Prairie Water Kickoff Overview
Coming together to talk sustainable prairie water management
By Jared Wolfe
We held our official Prairie Water Kickoff workshop on January 29th and 30th at the National Hydrology Research Centre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The event provided the opportunity for Prairie Water investigators and partners to engage on the program’s overarching objectives, framework, and communication plan.
Participants included those already involved in Prairie Water in addition to new contacts. Over 50 people from 17 user organizations across the Canadian Prairies participated in active dialogue on water-related needs and potential support tools to maintain community resiliency.
Prairie Water aimed to create space for water users to voice their ideas and facilitate collaboration among diverse interests. We kicked off the event with a sharing circle activity where participants described a picture to represent their relationship to water on the Prairies. Following activities included sessions to discuss prairie water risks, unknowns, policy challenges, and management tools, and research themes of the Prairie Water program.
Larger group workshops had participants express their ideal vision of the future of the Prairies and where we must prioritize our efforts in order to reach that outcome. Scenarios centered on natural systems (e.g., length and extremes of wet/dry cycles) and management concerns (e.g., wetland drainage, groundwater sustainability, and cooperation among governing bodies). Together, these will advise model visualizations in Prairie Water moving forward.
We closed the event with a final conversation on project-wide integration. We focused not only on how pieces of Prairie Water research fit together, but how we can co-produce information and grow our user community.
The Kickoff marked the first annual meeting of Prairie Water as well as the first collective gathering of the program’s current user base. The valuable input generated will inform project deliverables and Prairie Water’s knowledge mobilization plan, including media strategies to effectively mobilize these products to prairie communities and stakeholders.