A new era of water planning is arriving in the Interior
The basin's licences now exceed its dry-year supply. The plans being drafted this year decide who blinks first.
The number that reorganizes everything arrived without ceremony, in a technical appendix: the Okanagan basin's licensed water allocations now exceed its modelled dry-year supply. Not its average supply — the basin still balances in a normal year — but the dry year that the climate record says to expect roughly one year in five.
The gap is not a crisis; it is a queue. Water law resolves scarcity by licence seniority, which means in a dry year the systems that blink first are the newest — which in this valley means the newest subdivisions and the newest orchein blocks, not the oldest. The people who bought last carry the risk they were never shown.
The response now underway is the least glamorous work in public administration: basin-scale drought plans, drafted jointly by the water utilities, the irrigation districts, the province and the Okanagan Nation Alliance, that decide the curtailment order in advance — trading the seniority queue for a negotiated one, with agriculture, ecosystems and households each holding defined positions.
The plans go to their boards this winter. They are long, technical and unlikely to trend. They are also, in a fully allocated basin, the closest thing the valley has to a constitution — and unlike most constitutions, this one is being written while everyone can still afford to be reasonable.
