While the Watershed Governance impact measure identifies mechanisms to support watershed governance within the 25 major watersheds of Canada, this impact measure examines the extent to which watershed entities are present within the 167 sub-watersheds of Canada, including a watershed plan.

A watershed entity may take many forms. Important to this measure is the presence of an identifiable, multi-partner, watershed-based organization. This means that it has an institutional form, holds meetings, and is tangible.

An identifiable watershed plan is also important to guide watershed entities and their decisions. According to the Fraser Basin Council’s guide to watershed planning, a watershed plan is a strategy that assesses the state of a watershed and presents detailed management information in terms of analyses, actions, participants and resources required for developing and implementing the plan. Ecosystems-based planning builds on this by advancing an approach that considers the full range of activities and interactions within a watershed, rather than focusing on isolated issues or species.

To gain baseline data for this impact measure, we conducted a desktop scan of Canada’s 167 sub-watersheds, searching for the existence of a watershed entity and a watershed plan.

Please note, there are a number of limitations to acknowledge from this research:

• There are many types of ‘watershed entities’ across Canada that fall across a continuum from formalized, to semi-formal, to voluntary and advocacy based. In order for us to ‘count’ a watershed, we gave preference towards entities on the formal to semi-formal side of the continuum. Including and ‘counting’ entities versus excluding and not ‘counting’ others was certainly more of an art than a science.
• The scope of issues which a ‘watershed entity’ focuses on also differs (from water being one of many issues, to water being the only focus, while leaving out some aspects of water management). It would not be accurate to claim that any one watershed entity we included in this scan is the same as another. They are as necessarily diverse as the watersheds they exist within.
• We used the same 167 sub-watersheds as WWF-Canada does in their Watershed Reports for our scan. However, most watershed entities that we included focus on a watershed boundary that is different from how they are defined by these 167.
• If we found a watershed plan, we included it in our analysis. Inclusion does not provide any qualitative analysis of the plan.
• Canada is a large country, and conducting a desktop assessment into all 167 sub-watersheds is likely to contain errors, missed watershed entities, and missed watershed plans. As always, if you see any errors or omissions, please let us know through email (info@ourlivingwaters.ca).

The detailed results of this desktop scan can be seen in this Google Sheet.

Last updated March 2019