ETV Canada is interested in working with governments, industries and other stakeholders to strengthen institutional capacity to develop and implement water conservation technologies and practices. Key issues include:

• Defining and communicating baseline conditions on current and emerging water conservation issues and their implications in relation to federal/provincial/territorial policies and agreements. This involves understanding the barriers and disincentives to effective water conservation policy implementation.
• Assisting key sectoral stakeholders in understanding and anticipating both the context and the scope of water conservation issues, as well as the priority areas against which needs can be assessed and progress can be measured.
• Guiding the implementation of stakeholder-driven performance benchmarking and the application of performance verification on selected technologies to ensure that performance criteria for water efficiency and conservation are appropriate to federal/provincial/territorial needs and priorities.
• Devising strategies to facilitate the adoption and use of water efficient technologies and conservation practices in a manner which addresses stakeholder needs.
• Preparing guidelines on technology performance monitoring and verification, as well as how to enhance capacity and capabilities to generate, store, retrieve and analyze water-related data.

Efforts in this area will help foster the establishment of transparent and accountable approaches for addressing water conservation challenges and opportunities, thereby improving the capacity to take action and provide leadership in implementing effective water solutions.

Recent ETV Canada performance benchmarking projects in the water and wastewater sector are described below.

Stormwater Management

Efforts are continuing in following up on the City of Toronto stakeholders’ consultation workshop, “Working Towards Developing a Test Protocol for Performance Verification of Hydrodynamic Separators in Stormwater Management Applications “, which took place in May 2007. The focus of the workshop was to present available testing and verification protocols for hydrodynamic separators, discuss the challenges in applying these protocols, and share the knowledge and related experiences of vendors, experts and other stakeholders. A collaborative approach was used to give stakeholders an opportunity to be involved in the early-stage development of testing and verification protocols for hydrodynamic separation devices. The overall intent of this approach was to create a level playing field for stakeholder dialogue.

In moving forward with this initiative, ETV Canada has prepared a follow up proposal which would involve four steps:

• Issuance of the final workshop report to all workshop participants as soon as possible.
• Establishment of a working group to develop the full scale laboratory testing and verification protocol - The proposed working group would include representatives from the City of Toronto, ETV Canada, Environment Canada, and NSF International. A visit to the NSF facility in Ann Arbor in December 2007 is also proposed.
• Development of the full scale laboratory testing and verification protocols.
• Implementation of a demonstration program in collaboration with interested stakeholders.

Following the successful demonstration of the full scale laboratory testing and verification protocols, and should stakeholders wish to proceed with actual field implementation, it is further proposed that consideration be given to the development of complementary decision support tools which could be used to augment the decision making process.