The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Blue Water Project has made a 10-year commitment to protect one of our planet’s most precious natural resources – fresh water.
“We launched the project in 2007 as a 10-year commitment of $50 million dollars to help protect fresh water globally,” said Canmore RBC Manager Michelle Dagenais.
“Since then we have pledged nearly $44 million dollars to more than 740 charitable organizations worldwide to help protect our water. We are focused on supporting initiatives that help protect water in our growing towns and cities by raising awareness of low impact design or natural systems to control rain water, encourage more efficient use of water and protect and restore urban water.”
On June 4, Dagenais presented a $20,000 cheque to Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Institute (Y2Y), and $10,000 to the Biosphere Institute of the Bow Valley for water preservation initiatives.
“Our project is called Upstream, Downstream and is about coming together to protect our headwaters and it really comes back to protecting our fresh water,” said Y2Y grants manager Claire Jarrold. “It’s not just about the water itself, but about erosion control, flood mitigation, protecting wildlife habitat and encouraging people to see the connection with people living in urban centres with where their water comes from.
“We’re in phase two of the project, which is based around land use planning in Alberta, it’s about engaging people and making sure they understand those connections and actually getting people on board to ask for more protection for the headwaters through designations of water conservations and education.”
Jarrold added Y2Y will look at how to mitigate restoring wildlife habitat, natural resources and services in terms of flood and drought control.
Melanie Watt, executive director of the Biosphere Institute of the Bow Valley, accepted her group’s grant which will go towards building edu-kits on water preservation.
“It’s an action program that involves putting together a kit of all kinds of things people can do to help preserve and protect water,” Watt said.
The institute will have incentives for people to take home on how to personally save water and have actions you can do to look more closely at water use in terms of protecting and preserving.
“We already have wildlife edu-kits, and what’s happening is we go into schools with the wildlife kits and the schools have said they want us to do something with water,” Watt said.
“The water edu-kits will come contained and are really hands-on. And we also have other programs that will tie in to actually cleaning up water areas as well as other outdoor action plans.
“What we would like to do is get people to share those actions with others, so we’re doing a Small Steps Campaign where if you do an action, take a quick picture of yourself and then share it on social media, whether you’re a classroom or an individual or a staff group, and the idea is to share it and challenge people to do other steps.”
Visit, www.biosphereinstitute.org to learn more about the Small Steps Campaign and further information on how to become involved with local community conservation.
