There’s a Big Difference Between “Water Management” and “Watershed Management”.
By Kevin Trimble.
There has been recent interest in reopening and modifying the Muskoka River Water Management Plan (MRWMP) to more effectively deal with flooding risk. MWC has argued that we need new tools to manage the environment and our land use activities. Continuing to deal in isolation with problems like flood mitigation risks unnecessary expense and ineffective outcomes. But by adopting integrated watershed management (IWM), we will be able to adapt to increasing flood risks while also considering forest fire prevention, land development pressure, community health and the economy.
The terms ‘water management’ and ‘watershed management’ are used interchangeably all too often by our citizens, citizen scientists, municipal employees and politicians. But there’s a big difference and it is important that watershed management should be implemented first.
Water management is just that – managing water, or attempting to manage water, for our use as it moves through our major rivers and lakes. MRWMP is water management. But water management is just one component of IWM, which is much broader.
The Muskoka River system has 42 dams that were constructed starting in the late 1800s to transport logs and facilitate commercial navigation. Power production started in 1894 and hydro-generating stations owned by five separate power companies now exist on 11 of those dams along with several control dams operated by the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR).
The MRWMP was put in place in 2006 by the MNR to manage power production by putting operational limitations on the dams that allow for recreational navigation and seasonal fish spawning.
While the system has some limited capacity to mitigate a flood, neither the network of dams, nor the water management plan were designed for flood control. The dams in the Muskoka River system are “run-of-river” operations in that they only pass the natural flows that they receive from upstream in the river system and they have limited or no ability to store water, whether for power generation or flood control. There are also no reservoirs for storage. In a flood scenario, the purpose of the MRWMP is to maintain the integrity of the structures, equitably distribute flood flows where possible, and provide flood relief wherever storage is available.
Furthermore, the MRWMP only deals with water once it has entered our major rivers and lakes with no external considerations except data from several snow monitoring stations and weather forecasts. It ignores the ways in which water moves through the 5,100 km2 of forests, towns, farmlands, small lakes, wetlands and headwater streams of the Muskoka River Watershed. The MRWMP does not include water quality, terrestrial ecology, land use planning and ecosystem functions beyond several wetland and fish spawning targets.
An IWM approach considers human and ecological functions across the entire watershed. It provides a tool or framework to help us decide how to manage our land use activities while dealing with issues such as floods and maintaining our high quality environment and socio-economic prosperity.
IWM considers all sources of floods, including our forests, wetlands and smallest headwater stream systems. It also looks at how water, and its movement through the landscape, support all of the natural features we depend on. And these aspects of water movement are intrinsically tied to many environmental services that our economy and livelihoods depend on.
With a collaborative watershed planning system, we can set socio-economic and ecological goals for our watershed that best address key issues such as floods, water quality problems, forest fire prevention and climate adaptation. Local land use decisions include watershed-wide, multi-disciplinary opportunities.
The differences between water management and watershed management become clear if we consider making changes to our watershed to alleviate floods. If we attempt to address flooding in isolation, and without a full understanding of how the whole watershed system functions with our communities, we won’t actually know what changes to make, what infrastructure to build or where to build it without significant risk to our socio-economic future.
This is #13 in the current series of articles from Muskoka Watershed Council, edited by Peter Sale. Its author is Kevin Trimble, Director and a past Chair of MWC. Kevin is a retired environmental scientist and Muskoka resident, and leads MWC’s IWM program. This article was published on MuskokaRegion.com on February 22, 2025.