by Lauren Kramer 

 (Byran Oborne, recipient of a $50,000 scholarship that will send him to Israel)

Bryan Oborne has a big smile on his face – and you can’t blame him. The 41-year-old PhD student at the University of Manitoba last week became the first recipient of a two-year, $50,000 scholarship that will send him to Israel to find local solutions to Manitoba’s water issues. 

As a doctoral student at the U of M’s Geography department, Oborne is exploring the potential for watershed governance on the Canadian Prairies. “I guess I have a deep interest and love for water and the water landscapes that define Canada,” he says. “I believe that if we look at things from a watershed perspective we’ll realize that water flows downstream, and if we take care of the problems upstream, the problems downstream will take care of themselves. Infrastructure to me should be focused on watershed basis. I maintain that we do have the money, we’re just spending it willy-nilly across the landscape and if we focused it on water we’d be able to solve a lot of water problems faster.” 

This will be the first trip to Israel for Oborne, who is considering taking his wife and two daughters along for some, if not all, of his time away. The recent Manitoba Water Symposium, held in Winnipeg August 12 to 14, put Oborne in touch with 12 Israeli scientists specializing in water management. “They’re amazing people and they’ve extended me all the support I would need, at least to make the contacts and find my way,” he says. “I’ve made some excellent contacts and have some offers of accommodation from institutes, so there are options.” 

Oborne hopes to be based in the region of the Lake Kinneret watershed, and says he anticipates the scholarship will afford him the opportunity to learn a great deal. “Being a water deficit region of the world, Israel has learned to deal with a lot of water challenges, with a quarter of the water per person that we have in Canada,” he explains. “They’ve made amazing innovations in agriculture and water use. I’m hoping to go there and learn what policy and legislature efforts they created in Israel that enabled them to deal with these problems. My interest is on the prairies and climate change, where we might face the same problems as Israel but 20-to-50 years in the future. Israel is a sneak peek at what we might face, and I think there will be significant insights we can apply to the prairie situation.”

 Oborne has had a long interest in sustainability. When the Winnipeg native graduated from the University of Winnipeg in 1989 he worked with the Manitoba Round Table and the Sustainable Development Coordination Unit for the Province of Manitoba. Later, he lived and worked with experts in wild rice harvesting and trapping in Northern Manitoba, and experts in zero-till grain farming in the Red River Valley. 

During his master’s degree in natural resources management, he moved to south-central Manitoba to research the economic effectiveness of small scale water management along the Manitoba escarpment.

 Then, in 1995, he established Panterra Management Ltd., a consulting firm that provides business and communication strategies for leading agricultural and natural resource-related organizations. The company’s specialty is understanding and addressing the watershed-based interrelationships among land, water, wildlife, and human resources.

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