“Water is a natural resource essential for life,” says Moussa Traore, an economics student in the Faculty of Social Sciences who receives his BSc from UVic this month. Traore arrived in Montreal seven years ago—leaving his home in Burkina Faso, Africa, a landlocked country that has endured a series of droughts and military coups over the past few decades.

A woman milks a water buffalo on a floating island near homes made from reeds. This image of a simple yet sustainable life in the southern Iraqi marshes—an image formed by Wilfred Thesiger’s classic text The Marsh Arabs—is vastly different from the present reality. The University of Victoria’s Canada-Iraq Marshlands Initiative (CIMI) wrapped up last year, but it is still not clear whether the traditional way of living will be anything more in future than descriptions of old photos or lives lived on the marshland margins.

Researchers all over the world dream of making new discoveries in well-established fields, but engineering grad Ana Zehtabi-Oskuie’s path has gone straight to the edge of an emerging field. While studying Electrical Engineering at the University of Tehran, Zehtabi-Oskuie became intrigued by optical trapping, a method pioneered in 2009 by electrical engineering professor Dr. Reuven Gordon, a team of UVic grad students and Dr. Romain Quidant at the Europe-based Institute of Photonic Sciences.

The BC coast is about to become the “smartest” on the planet. UVic’s Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) is partnering with Western Economic Diversification Canada and IBM Canada on a three-year multimillion dollar project known as Smart Oceans BC. The project builds on the know-how and technologies of VENUS and NEPTUNE—the world’s most advanced ocean observatories—to develop and install a series of mini-observatories, high-frequency radars, and automated vessel information systems at key points along the BC coast. ONC has already pioneered Smart Ocean Systems on VENUS and NEPTUNE, and on a mini-observatory in Nunavut. “Smart Oceans takes these proven technologies to a whole new level,” says Dr. Kate Moran, ONC president and CEO.

The provincial government has committed to a new Water Sustainability Act by early 2014, and researchers at UVic’s POLIS Project on Ecological Governance say that BC has the potential to become a standout example for sustainable freshwater management and protection.

A new model for BC’s fresh-water management and policies, including improved accountability for decision-makers, is proposed in a report released today by the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance at the University of Victoria.