The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for water names aquifers. Not in a preamble, not in a background note, in the text of the target itself:
protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers and lakes
Elsewhere in the same goal is a measure of water stress: how much water gets taken out, against how much there is to take. And what counts as there to take is only what is left after subtracting the water that has to stay where it is, in the ground and in the streams, for everything that depends on it to go on working, to go on living. The machinery is real, it is published, and any government that wants it can pick it up.
The details are in the UN’s indicator metadata, last updated 29 July 2024. The subtraction is not a gloss. You take out the water that has to stay before you work out how much there is to use. And the water being withdrawn is defined as what is taken “from its source (rivers, lakes, aquifers)“.
The metadata also sets out what the measure cannot do, and the list is worth reading in full.
Potentially large variation of sub-national data? A national figure cannot see a region, a basin, or a small island off Canada’s west coast.
And seasonal variation is not in it either, which on that same small island is the difference between February and August.
Other limitations that affect the interpretation of the water stress indicator include:
- difficulty to obtain accurate, complete and up-to-date data;
- potentially large variation of sub-national data;
- lack of account of historical (e.g., due to climate change and population growth) and seasonal variations in water resources;
- lack of consideration to the distribution among water uses;
- lack of consideration of water quality and its suitability for use; and
- the indicator can be higher than 100 percent when water withdrawal non-renewable freshwater [sic] (fossil groundwater), when annual groundwater withdrawal is higher than annual replenishment (over-abstraction) or when freshwater withdrawal includes part or all the water set aside for environmental flow requirements.
UN SDG indicator metadata, 6.4.2, section 4.b, last updated 29 July 2024.
Bowen Island Municipality reached for the ideas. The terms of reference for the committee steering the new Official Community Plan, established in 2024, require the revised plan to
follow principles found in the UN Goals for Sustainable Development
and, in the item immediately above it, to
meet the central object of the Islands Trust to preserve and protect the Trust Area and its unique amenities and environment for the benefit of the residents of the Trust Area and of British Columbia
(Official Community Plan Steering Committee Terms of Reference, section 2.2 a)
Protect. Restore. Preserve.
Fine words, active verbs all.
tick tock
The UN target came with a date, and it was not 2030. In full, it reads “by 2020, protect and restore water-related ecosystems“. That year has been and gone. The most recent UN report on the target, published in 2024, sets out what it calls the “acceleration needs to achieve target 6.6 by 2030” (UN-Water, Progress on Water-related Ecosystems, 2024 Update). Nobody amended the target. The date simply moved.
What did not stop was the counting. The indicator under that target has a box for groundwater: change over time in the volume of water held in a country’s major aquifers.
source: United Nations Environment Programme, SDG indicator metadata: Indicator 6.6.1, Change in the extent of water-related ecosystems over time, harmonized metadata template format version 1.1, last updated 11 June 2025. UN Statistics Division, SDG Indicators Metadata Repository. Retrieved August 31 2026.
It is not a token box. The methodology (in the metadata guide cited above) says that all the components of the indicator matter, because together they make what it calls a comprehensive picture, one that enables informed decisions towards the protection and restoration of water-related ecosystems.
But the countries did not have the data. Pilot testing in 2017 established that, and the answer was to bring in satellites alongside whatever national data existed. All of it processed by internationally recognised methods, assessed and approved by countries, and producing, in the methodology’s own words, “high quality global datasets with extensive spatial and temporal scale“.
Then, further along in the same document:
Global data products for river flows and groundwater level have not yet been produced at useful spatial and temporal resolutions to be incorporated into this SDG 6.6.1 methodology. Currently, these data should continue to be provided from modelling or from ground-based measurements and required from the countries.
The satellites can see the surface. They cannot see the water table.
So the fix reaches every part of the picture except the part where the gap was found. Groundwater has to come from the countries, measured on the ground, which is precisely what the 2017 testing showed they were not doing. The box stays where it is, and the method says plainly who is supposed to fill it and how.
Twenty-seven countries report their groundwater quantity to the UN. Canada is not one of them, and neither is the United States. Burundi, Fiji, the Marshall Islands and Sudan are.
So there is a target, and there is a measure. What the plan being written for this island binds itself to is neither. It binds itself to the principles.
At the national level, Canada’s report to the United Nations on all of this is its Voluntary National Review, the last one filed in 2023. Search it for groundwater and there are no matches. Zero return:
The report positions itself “[a]s we mark the halfway point of the 2030 Agenda“. Halfway to 2030. Three years past 2020.
The introduction can fairly be described as self-congratulatory:
The 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) chart the path to overcome these crises and build a future that is fair, equal, and peaceful, with clean air and clean water for everyone
Look at how that sentence is built. Fair, equal, peaceful, and then, in the position a sentence saves for what it wants remembered, clean air and clean water for everyone.
Those are not the same kind of thing. Fairness, equality and peace are critical to a decent human life. But people have lived without them. Nobody has lived without air, or without water.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of those ideas that is simply around, in management courses and self-help books, in classrooms and on social media. In the paper where he first set it out, in 1943, the needs of the body are at the bottom, and everything else rests on them (pp. 372–375).
Fairness is in the paper too, though not as a need. Maslow puts justice and fairness among the conditions the needs depend on. They are not ends in themselves, he says, but almost, because without them the needs cannot be met, or not safely (p. 383).
Air and water sit underneath all of it. With them it is not a question of how much or how well. It is binary. You have them or you die.
That difference carries through into how they can be counted. How fair a country is, or how equal, has to be argued over before it can be measured at all, and the argument does not end. Air and water are not like that. They are measured directly, in agreed units, by agreed methods, against thresholds set in advance. Water quality has an indicator with a box for each kind of water body. Nobody has to decide what would count. It has been decided.
The two things nobody can live without are the two easiest to measure, and the report shows it knows how. For air, it counts people: between the 2005 to 2007 and 2017 to 2019 reporting periods, the share of Canadians living where outdoor air met every national standard rose from 63 per cent to 71 (p. 70). In the water chapter there is no such number.
What the water chapter does count is long-term drinking water advisories on First Nations reserves: 138 lifted between November 2015 and February 2023 (p. 52). That record has its own history, and it is not mine to tell.
This essay is about one island, and about people who own their own wells. It is not about the drinking water crisis in First Nations communities, which is older, larger and different in kind, and which is not mine to describe. It is documented by the people living it, and by their own organisations. If you have not read that record, these are places to begin:
- First Nations Health Authority, drinking water advisories. The health authority governed by and for First Nations in BC. It publishes its own monthly summary of advisories in First Nations communities here, which the federal counts leave out. https://www.fnha.ca/what-we-do/environmental-health/drinking-water-advisories
- The First Nations Advisory Committee on Safe Drinking Water. Set up under the 2021 settlement, it oversees what Canada committed to spend, at least $6 billion before March 2030. https://thefnac.ca/
- Indigenous Watchdog. Indigenous-led tracking of advisories and of the legislation, including that the 2026 bill dropped the recognition of a human right to clean drinking water carried in the previous one. https://www.indigenouswatchdog.org/subcategory/drinking-water-advisories/
- Human Rights Watch, Make it Safe, 2016. The international report, on contaminants, conditions and Canada’s obligations. https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/06/07/make-it-safe/canadas-obligation-end-first-nations-water-crisis
- Indigenous Services Canada, ending long-term drinking water advisories. The federal count and the federal account of itself, for comparison with the others. https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1506514143353/1533317130660
That there were and are so many to lift, and that so many had been in place for so long, is shameful.
One thing does connect that experience and Bowen Island’s, and it is not experience but law. Here in British Columbia, water is still, in law, the property of the Crown. The Water Sustainability Act vests the water in every stream in the government, and vests groundwater wherever it is found in the government too, “conclusively deemed to have always been vested” (s. 5). So is most of the land: 94 per cent of the province is provincial Crown land, and 5 per cent is privately owned. That is a colonial arrangement, and I think it is one of the reasons Canada is so bad at recognising, let alone facing, what is happening to its land and water.
In the 2023 report for the UN, the then prime minister in the same introduction continues:
I am honoured to co-chair the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General’s SDG Advocates group, a responsibility that I do not take lightly. I continue working closely with my co-chair, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, in uniting countries, governments, Indigenous Peoples, the private sector, and other partners, to accelerate progress and grow our ambition as we move toward 2030.
Read it for its verbs. He is honoured. He does not take it lightly. He continues working closely. They are uniting. And what all that uniting is for is to accelerate progress and to grow our ambition.
Ambition is what is being grown. Not the number of people who can drink the water where they live. And it is being grown as we move toward 2030, which is the year the 2020 deadline became when nobody amended it.
Every word of it is true. None of it is about water.
And then from his ministers:
Internationally, Canada is leading on the 2030 Agenda
In the body of the report, Canada tells the UN it is on track on water. The report says of Goal 6 that “an increase in the proportion of rivers rated as having good to excellent water quality demonstrates a trend that is on track toward the ambition that Canadians have access to drinking water and use it in a sustainable manner” (p. 52).
Rivers. Read that again, slowly, because the sentence is built to be read quickly. There is a proportion, of rivers, rated good to excellent. An increase in the proportion rated good or excellent demonstrates a trend. The trend is on track. On track toward an ambition. And the ambition is that Canadians have access to drinking water and use it sustainably.
Count the steps between a river measurement and water coming out of a tap. Nothing in that sentence says anyone has drinking water. It says a number about rivers is moving in a direction that is consistent with hoping so.
The figure carrying that number is labelled “Domestic Indicator 6.4.1“. The indicator is Canada’s own, from a framework Statistics Canada maintains alongside the UN’s. The current (2024) version of the Canadian framework for Goal 6:
The UN’s 6.4.1 measures something else:
source: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal6#targets_and_indicators, retrieved August 31 2026.
And Canada’s entry for its own 6.4.1 reads, in full: no specific target.
That is the non-existent target Canada pointed to in its report to the UN with an “on-track” pointer indicating the maximum level.
The rating behind it sorts each site into one of five bands: excellent, good, fair, marginal, poor. The report quotes the top two together and leads with them.
Underneath, the number was eighty-one sites rated good or excellent. A site is one sampling point on a river, not a river. It needs four samples a year over three years to count, and winter can be dropped. Each is scored on between five and fifteen substances, chosen locally, and only ones that happen to have a guideline. The sites are a curated list in the sixteen southernmost drainage regions. Rivers. Not aquifers.
The report’s water chapter runs three pages. The words groundwater and aquifer do not appear in it once. Nor does well, except in “as well as” and “well-managed”.
That is the measure Canada set for itself.
The UN sets its own, and it is not the same one. It is not even the same indicator. The groundwater box I described above sits under the ecosystems target; this is the water quality one, and it has three parts: rivers, open water bodies, and groundwater. Canada fills in one. So the number that stands for the quality of all Canada’s water is the number for some of its rivers. Nothing else is in the average, because nothing else was entered.
And that is not a gap in the method. The method defines a body of water as one of three things, a stretch of river, a lake, or an aquifer, and it sets out which measurements apply to groundwater specifically. The aquifers are supposed to be in there. Canada’s are not.
A country with more lake area than any other on earth files nothing for lakes. And nothing for groundwater or aquifers either:
2023 is the halfway point of a fifteen-year agenda to ensure water and sanitation for all, and Canada’s account of where it stands is eighty-one sampling points, for rivers.
Since then the self-selected number to represent being “on track” towards an ambition has fallen. Sixty-six of a hundred and fifty-seven sites are now rated good or excellent, and the share rated marginal or poor is the highest in ten years.
what came next
The report also set out next steps. A Canada Water Agency, to find the best ways to keep Canada’s water safe, clean and well managed. And a strengthened Freshwater Action Plan, with historic investments to protect and restore large lakes and river systems.
Both happened. The Agency was legislated in 2024 and sits in Winnipeg. Its mandate is coordination on transboundary water. The Action Plan is six hundred and fifty million dollars over ten years, spent on eight named waters: the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg, Lake of the Woods, the St. Lawrence, the Wolastoq/Saint John, the Fraser, the Mackenzie, Lake Simcoe.
Groundwater, aquifer and drinking water do not appear on the Agency’s mandate page. They do not appear on the Action Plan’s overview page.
In 2024 the International Association of Hydrogeologists, in a brief from its Canadian National Chapter to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, said the Agency should update its website to reference groundwater, “which is not presently mentioned“. Two years on, still not mentioned.
In March 2026 the Agency announced work on a National Water Security Strategy. Engagement timelines, it said, would follow. Groundwater appears in the announcement once, in a quick fact at the bottom: “Canada faces a range of water-related challenges such as droughts, floods, pollution, wildfires, aging critical water infrastructure, stresses on groundwater, permafrost degradation, and algal blooms, to name a few.” The minister’s own quote names the lakes, the wetlands and the rivers.
all things old are new again
In October 1969 the province of BC limited subdivision across the Gulf Islands to a ten-acre minimum. Magic Lake Estates on North Pender had already produced over twelve hundred city-sized lots, Mudge Island had gone to a hundred and eighty-five half-acre lots, and further large subdivisions were planned or approved for Mayne, Salt Spring and Bowen.
In February 1973 an all-party select standing committee was set up to inquire into the future development of the islands. Its report came back that September. The priority concern was large subdivisions and over-development. Alongside it the committee noted the need to limit commercial and industrial land use, to keep recreational opportunities open, to coordinate water transportation, and to recognise the potential shortage of potable water. The Islands Trust Act was introduced the following May and proclaimed on 5 June 1974.
So the water was there at the beginning, and it was not a separate item on the list. The concern was subdivision. On islands, subdivision is how the water fails. And the instrument the province reached for in 1969 was a minimum lot size, because the number of houses on the land above an aquifer is the only part of it anyone can control.
The Trust still names the water. Its freshwater programme page says today that its mandate is to preserve and protect the unique amenities and environment of the Trust Area, and that among those unique amenities is freshwater, “which is inherently vulnerable on the islands“.
Bowen’s own plan, its Official Community Plan, Bylaw 14, adopted in 1981 and reviewed the year after, set out what it still needed. A surface water study was under way, run by the provincial water resources branch. It should be supplemented, the plan said, by a study of groundwater supply. Necessary, and to be done in the near future.
The near future. British Columbia did not require a licence to take groundwater until 2016. The first provincial observation well on Bowen went in around 2021. And in 2023 a national account of how the country is doing on water returned no matches for the word groundwater.
A gap in a table is not a gap in the world. The water goes on being taken whether or not anyone writes the number down, and what that looks like when it has gone far enough is not a matter of guesswork.
In Mexico City, water comes by appointment. The word for it is tandeo, taking turns. The city lists the neighbourhoods in its official gazette, as it did again in January 2026, 284 of them in ten boroughs on the 2025 list, and runs a website where you choose your neighbourhood and it tells you when your water will come. In some, that is twice a week, for about three hours, in the middle of the night.
You set an alarm. You fill the tank, the barrels, the buckets. Then you wait for the next time.
Not an emergency. A timetable.
About two thirds of the water the metropolitan area uses is pumped from the aquifer beneath it. As the aquifer is drained the ground sinks, in places by tens of centimetres a year, and the compaction does not reverse. A 2021 study of it is titled, in part, “no hope for significant elevation and storage capacity recovery”. In the same January gazette, owners whose buildings are cracked by the sinking can have their property tax forgiven.
That is easy to file as somewhere else. It is not. Gabriola is the island in the Trust Area most like Bowen: about 4,500 people to Bowen’s 4,250, on about as much land, a short ferry from a city. The rock underneath is different; the shortage is not.
When the community health centre opened there in 2012, its well held 140 feet of water. By late 2022 it held 30. Wells drilled nearby to 400 feet did little better, so the centre now collects rain.
In the dry season, water is trucked onto the island from Nanaimo. Freedom of information requests to the City of Nanaimo, filed by a resident of another island, put one hauler’s deliveries at about five million litres in a season, and another’s at 30,283 litres a day. At that rate, over six months, it comes to five and a half million more. That’s ten and a half million litres, for six month’s supply.
The Islands Trust’s policy is that islands should be self-sufficient in their supply of freshwater. Should, not shall. Gabriola is where the Trust is now piloting a freshwater footprint, an island-wide account of water supply and use meant to inform land use planning, begun in December 2024.
On Bowen Island, every municipal water system is under seasonal restriction from the first of May to the end of October, and all seven of them are at stage three today. The Municipality’s own page says that Bowen’s water comes from rainfall collected in the aquifers and watersheds, and that we do not have an unlimited amount of water.
The UN World Water Development Report for 2022, on groundwater, puts it this way:
All too often, the adoption of a groundwater policy is primarily focused on the utilization of groundwater after abstraction. This is far removed from sound management of the aquifer, which requires attention to land use, replenishment, protection, and implementation of measures that aim at preserving groundwater system services and functions.
UNESCO, on behalf of UN-Water, The United Nations World Water Development Report 2022: Groundwater: Making the Invisible Visible. Paris: UNESCO, 2022, p. 8 (Executive Summary, “Policy and planning”). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380721
The Municipality encourages people on private wells to follow the conservation stages too:
“Residents who rely on private wells are also encouraged to follow the conservation stages, as doing so supports the long-term sustainability of local groundwater sources.”
and it offers them tips. Monitor the depth of your well. Coordinate a tanker delivery with your neighbours. Size a storage tank to the natural recharge capacity of the well you have.
The notice that advice sits under, a notice that introduces itself as responding to reports of wells running dry, still describes the Water Sustainability Act as a thing that will come into effect. That Act came into force in 2016.
And in the summer of 2021 I wrote here that we had gone many days when minimal use drained our well for hours, and that I would spare readers the details of how rarely I had been able to do laundry, or to bathe.
Contamination is the other way it goes, and it is worse, because the water can be there and be unusable. Arsenic occurs naturally in the rock under parts of this island, and wells here have been abandoned because of it.
Neither of those is reversible in any sense a household could act on. You cannot refill an aquifer, and you cannot clean one.
Which is why there is a principle for exactly this situation, and why it is not a pious one. It comes from Rio in 1992, and it says that where the threatened damage is serious or irreversible, the absence of full scientific certainty is not a reason to postpone protective measures. It is a rule about what to do when you do not know. Ordinarily, if nothing has been shown to be wrong, you carry on. Under this principle, when the harm would be permanent, not knowing is the reason to act rather than the reason to wait.
Canada has adopted it. The Supreme Court has applied it to a municipal bylaw. It is in Bowen’s current Official Community Plan, Policy 12:
The natural limitations of the land will be considered when assessing the type and intensity of proposals for development on Bowen Island by applying the ‘precautionary principle’ of environmental decision-making.
And it is in the draft of the new one being written this year. In the Schedule C glossary it is defined:
Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, known as the precautionary principle, states: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” Four central components of the precautionary principle include: taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and increasing public participation in decision making. (Source: The Precautionary Principle in Environmental Science, Kriebel et al., 2001)
the record
British Columbia has a law requiring its Provincial Health Officer to produce a report on drinking water every year, and requiring the minister to put it before the Legislature. Over the ten years to 2022, that annual duty produced two documents. Not repealed, not refused, not fought over in public. Just … not done.
Annual reporting then resumed, and the first of the new reports, covering 2022 to 2023, is dated December 2024. Its transmittal letter describes it as the first Provincial Health Officer’s annual report of activities under the Act. The Act came into force in May 2003. The next, covering 2023 to 2024, is dated December 2025 and is signed not by the Provincial Health Officer but by a deputy. Both are addressed to the Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship rather than to Health, and each arrived about twenty months after the year it reports on.
The year that ended in March 2025 is still unreported – the reports page, archived 28 September 2026, lists nothing later than 2023/24.
Something else changed with the frequency. The two five-year documents ended with recommendations, 32 in one and 20 in the other. The new annual reports are described by the ministry as summaries of permitting, inspection, monitoring and enforcement. They make no recommendations. The Auditor General had already found the pattern in 2019: reporting required annually had occurred infrequently, and many recommendations from earlier reports had seen limited or no progress.
What the reports do show, when they arrive, is that the number of drinking water advisories standing in this province has risen by nearly two thirds in a decade, while the number of water systems has barely changed. A water system, in the law, is anything that supplies drinking water to more than one house: a municipal system, two houses on a shared well, a campground, a business. Each one needs a permit from the health authority, and each one can be put under an advisory. It is not that more places are being counted. The same places are in more trouble.
Then there is this island. Just over four thousand people. The health authority that oversees drinking water here, Vancouver Coastal Health, also covers Vancouver, Richmond, the North Shore, the Sunshine Coast and Sea to Sky. Of all the water systems registered with it, roughly one in nine is on Bowen.
Of the 643 drinking water advisories listed for the whole of British Columbia today, fifteen are on Bowen. That is 2.3 per cent of provincial advisories, on an island holding less than a tenth of one per cent of the province’s people.
“every dollar we invest today is a dollar that protects future generations from higher costs and greater risk“
Bowen Island Municipality, website post for Asset Management Day, 13 May 2026 https://bowenislandmunicipality.ca/2026/05/13/happy-asset-management-day-from-bowen-island-municipality/
The Municipality manages what it owns as assets, and it adopted a policy to govern how.
That policy defines a natural asset as a naturally occurring feature that provides ecosystem services and reduces the need for built infrastructure, and the first example it gives is an aquifer. It requires the Municipality to recognise natural assets as integral components of the asset base and to value what they provide.
The register that policy governs holds three hundred and twenty-three culverts. Each one carries about forty pieces of information: replacement cost to the dollar, condition, risk rating, the year it went in, the year it was last inspected, written notes on the corrosion. They are listed by road. Adams. Laura. Grafton Point. Woods.
There is no natural asset in it. Bridges and culverts, buildings, fleet, land, land improvements, machinery and equipment, road network, sanitary sewer network, storm water network, water network, and work in progress. The culvert is costed to the dollar.
The water running through it is not there at all.