Spotlight on Sustainability: Pablo Pina Poujol

When you think about water use in Calgary, you generally think about the two rivers that run through the city — especially after the floods — but in fact, most of the water we use is from ground water, and Pablo Pina Poujol is studying this water in the soil to help with land use planning.

“We’re developing a way to understand how the landscape produces the water and how this water transfers into lakes and rivers and how the usage of this land cover can be understood in our plans, in serving the regional planning,” says Pina Poujol, a post doc in the Faculty of Environmental Design.

Working in partnership with the Calgary Regional Partnership, Pina Poujol is looking at critical ecological infrastructure and how that landscape is connected across the Calgary region in order to conduct a resilience assessment and then develop a model to help guide regional land use planning.

The project has three phases. First, Pina Poujol is studying the human footprint: “How are we affecting the integrity of the landscape in terms of ecological connectivity.” The second stage will examine the critical components of land cover and water flows. “The third stage would be about defining key areas in the landscape and understanding the political governance of the landscape,” he says. “How can we translate these key ecological regions in the landscape into the planning side, into the policy side, and more over how is this ecological infrastructure already seen.”

The project represents a long-term relationship between the Calgary Regional Partnership and Dr. Michael Quinn (Director and Talisman Energy Chair for Environmental Sustainability at Mount Royal University) and Dr. Mary-Ellen Tyler (Associate Professor for the Faculty of Environmental Design at University of Calgary) as part of their research for strategic policy formation for regional land use planning. “It’s a big scale project. It involves 14 municipalities and we’re more in the exploratory stage,” he says. “We’re using the information available and coming up with a framework a methodology of steps, and then maybe we can follow up with more research and in-depth analysis.”

Pina Poujol says most of us tend to take water for granted most of the time, but the floods that devastated southern Alberta this past June have made the general public more aware of, and interested in, water cycles and water management. “I think it was a very unfortunate event but also brings an incredible opportunity to educate ourselves, how do we see ourselves as water managers and how do we see water management overall.”

Spotlight on Sustainability is an ongoing series profiling the work of students, faculty and staff. To submit story ideas please contact the Office of Sustainability.