Delta is contributing $10,000 to the Delta Farmers’ Institute (DFI) to implement a new program proposed by the B.C. Agriculture & Food Climate Action Initiative (CAI) that will expand the monitoring of salinity in Delta’s irrigation canals.
And as per the DFI’s request, the city will continue to work with them and the CAI to carry out this program that will build off the recently completed Fraser River irrigation water salinity monitoring project and allow for farmers to have more extensive, continuous data on salinity.
The proposed project will involve installing additional monitoring sites at key locations within Delta’s irrigation canals and is one of several programs put forward by the CAI and the city over the past nine years to help Delta’s agriculture sector adapt to climate change – which are typically led by the DFI – as part of their regional adaptation strategies program.
The city’s original climate change adaptation strategies plan was developed in 2013 in collaboration with the CAI, where 11 strategies and 26 actions were identified for how Delta’s agriculture sector could adapt to climate change.
Those strategies were then updated in 2017.
Not including this new project, 14 projects addressing priority actions in the strategies plan have been implemented within Delta since 2013 through working with the CAI – four of which have been either recently completed or are in the process of being wrapped up in this current implementation phase.
These include the Strengthening Communications and Preparedness for Flooding Events project, the Delta’s Future Agricultural Water Supply & Demand project, the Increasing Accessibility and Applications of Salinity Monitoring Data in Delta and the Delta Greenhouse Water Supply Risks & Options project.
“The B.C. Agriculture & Food Climate Action Initiative works with partners in Delta to deliver projects that equip producers and the agricultural community to adapt to climate change,” reads a Delta staff report presented at the Feb. 14th council meeting. “Continued support of Delta’s agricultural community through climate change adaptation planning will strengthen Delta’s ability to withstand climate change impacts into the future and help support a resilient agricultural economy within Delta.”
At the end of January, as part of the ongoing work under the CAI’s regional strategies program, the initiative hosted a two-day flood risk workshop for Delta producers.
There, they promoted an on-farm flood planning and preparedness toolkit, which includes eight fact sheets providing information “about topics ranging from determining flood risk level to protecting livestock,” and eight planning worksheets.
The workshop was supported by the DFI and Delta staff, who, through their engineering and emergency management staff, presented on flood risk and emergency response in Delta.
