On 22 March 2026, coinciding with World Water Day, the Government of Canada announced the launch of its first-ever National Water Security Strategy, to be led by the Canada Water Agency in collaboration with provincial, territorial and municipal governments, Indigenous Peoples, stakeholders and the public.
Protecting water is not just an environmental imperative — it is a national one
Despite holding around 20% of the world's fresh water, Canada accesses only 7% of the global renewable supply — a distinction that frames water security as a matter of stewardship rather than abundance. Growing pressures make that stewardship increasingly urgent: more frequent droughts and floods, permafrost thaw reshaping northern hydrology, aging infrastructure, pollution, invasive species and accelerating biodiversity loss all threaten both the quality and quantity of the country's freshwater resources.
A week of freshwater commitments
The World Water Day announcement coincided with the release, just three days earlier, of the National Freshwater Science Agenda (NFSA) — a complementary initiative that signals the government's intent to ground its freshwater policy in coordinated, evidence-based science. The release of the NFSA, alongside the launch of the Strategy development process, reflects a broader push to align what Canada knows about its freshwater systems with how it manages and protects them.
The NFSA is the result of over two years of engagement with more than 800 experts, Knowledge Holders and science users. Rather than an implementation roadmap, it is a priorities framework to guide collaborative freshwater research over the coming decade, organised under seven interconnected themes:
- Indigenous science and knowledge systems
- Water availability and the impacts of cryosphere loss and climate change
- Land-use stressors and water pollution, including cumulative effects
- Freshwater ecosystem resilience and biodiversity
- Regional perspectives across five major drainage areas
- Socio-ecological and economic research, including cost-benefit analysis
- Decision-support systems to connect science with water management
The Water Security Strategy will seek to address freshwater risks, allocate resources and protect ecosystems through coordinated national action. Consultations will include provinces and territories, First Nations, Inuit and Métis partners, and the general public, with engagement timelines to be announced. The federal government is also advancing a review of the Canada Water Act in parallel.
What makes this approach distinctive
Three features set the overall effort apart from previous initiatives.
First, Indigenous science is treated as an equal and essential knowledge system rather than a supplementary input. The NFSA uses the concepts of "bridging, braiding, and weaving" to describe progressively deeper levels of integration between Indigenous and Western science — from mutual recognition, through wholistic co-understanding, to the full application of Indigenous methodologies in freshwater management.
Second, the NFSA takes a deliberately broad view of why freshwater matters, framing it within a water-energy-food nexus and incorporating a 'One Health' lens that connects ecosystem health to human and animal health, from waterborne pathogens to food security in remote and Indigenous communities.
Third, a National Freshwater Data Strategy, currently under development, will address the fragmented state of Canada's existing freshwater data, ensuring the science informing the NFSA is consistently discoverable and usable across jurisdictions.
A CAD 650 million foundation
All three initiatives build on the Government of Canada's Freshwater Action Plan, backed by a CAD 650 million, ten-year investment. In her World Water Day statement, Minister Julie Dabrusin captured the stakes: "Protecting water is not just an environmental imperative — it is a national one."
