Working to Protect Ontario’s Watersheds, their Natural Heritage, and our Receiving Waters

The OHI’s Civic Engagement portfolio refers to short-term projects and on-going programs designed to enhance Ontario’s framework approach to watershed management in a collaborative manner.

From 2009 to 2014, this included two Symposia and sets of regional meetings on three topics across South-central Ontario with multiple partners and about 800  participants, followed by the launch of Headwater Hikes with more partners and participants.

In 2018, we launched the WaterScape project, followed in 2019 by a survey on sustainable land use planning and then in 2020 by WaterScape III, in which most regional meetings were turned by the Covid-19 pandemic in to webinars. For a number of reasons, we have maintained the material from 2018 and 2019 on this website, which you can see here.   Efforts from 2020, including the Declaration to Preserve Ontario’s Ecological Integrity, have become an on-going collaborative program to protect South-central Ontario’s biodiversity, resilient landscapes, and healthy waters. It is now referred to just as WaterScape, and its material is now posted to its own website, seen here.

In January, 2020, we launched a companions program to WaterScape, called Headwater Alliances. While Waterscape will remain focused on the provincial framework for healthy in watersheds, this sister program take a regional and more granular perspective on protecting our headwaters and their catchments. We will keep this new program on this website foe the time being, and you can visit it here –  Headwater Alliances.