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Great Lakes Agreements All Around

Revisions to a major Great Lakes Basin water agreement may offer lasting protection against diversions of the basin’s most precious fluid asset, but may also fail to provide for restoration of its ecosystems.

The Great Lakes contain 20 percent of the planet’s surface freshwater, and attempts to insulate it from siphoning extend back a century. However, demand for freshwater within the basin and rising population nationally and internationally has made the lakes an even larger, more desirable target. When an Ontario, Canada, company was granted a permit in 1998 to haul water to Asia, the inadequacy of these earlier efforts became evident.

Between 2001 and 2004, the eight Great Lakes states and the provinces of Quebec and Ontario drew up the Great Lakes Basin Water Resource Agreement, an extraordinary nonbinding compact (since none can sign treaties). A companion agreement known as the Great Lakes Basin Water Resource Compact, however, will be binding among the states if approved by Congress and the respective state legislatures. Click here for links to full documents.

The 2001 Great Lakes Charter Annex, as it is called, established limits on water drawn for uses outside the basin, called for conservation, required restoration (also called “improvement”) projects for all diversions, and decreed that returned water must be sent to its source (thus helping to keep lake levels up for the protection of wetland and aquatic species), and to control the spread of invasive species.

Initially released in the summer of 2004, the Annex document drew 10,000 public comments mostly favorable to the need for stronger protections as sought by the governors. The Province of Ontario subsequently refused to sign the Annex unless protections were strengthened. A revised version was released for public comment in June of 2005.

In the new document, water diversions outside the basin were all but prohibited. Critics worry, however, about the omission of incentives for conservation, and the ecosystem restoration (improvement) standard. The latter was removed under the rationale that an organization or company might dangle money for restoration work in front of a state just to get a permit to take water. The governors worried that not enough support from Canadian environmental organizations meant that there was little support for the restoration standard. Those worries were dashed after a February summit hosted by the Joyce Foundation and Johnson Foundation, now clearing the way for a reinstatement of the restoration provisions.

“No longer is it good enough,” said Cameron Davis, executive director of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, “to not let things get worse.” While Davis thinks the Annex is a significant initial step, he also believes that the governors need to make good on their promise to keep the policy’s restoration standards.

— Elizabeth Riotto