Officials to update binational Great Lakes agreement despite persistent data gaps

Commentary

Although a surprising number of data gaps exist, the United States and Canada are heading down the home stretch with their first major update in 25 years of a landmark agreement to restore the Great Lakes from both sides of the border.

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was originally signed in 1972 by former President Richard Nixon and former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, then renewed in 1978 and updated in 1987 after rivers, streams and shorelines that form regional hotspots of pollution, known as areas of concern, were identified.

The new agreement, expected to be signed this spring, will attempt to be more streamlined, less cumbersome, and more user-friendly. As important as anything, though, will be its greater emphasis on pollution prevention, according to Cameron Davis, senior adviser to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and a member of the U.S. negotiating team.

These agreements stimulate a greater interest in lake protection and foster a more cooperative understanding of problems, at least in the short term. That spirit of dual responsibility for the world’s largest source of fresh surface water first arose in a legal framework with the Boundary Waters Act of 1909, which created the International Joint Commission to help the United States and Canada work together on bodies of water they share.

But in 2012, we need more than promises and symbolism. No matter how modernized the new Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is in light of emerging issues such as climate change and oxygen-depleted pockets of water known as “dead zones,” a lot of the hands-on work comes down to the depth of available research. That, of course, takes a financial commitment. Research is as tough of a sell in today’s economy as mega-million cleanup costs.

Much has been said about the former George W. Bush administration identifying more than $20 billion of necessary work when the Great Lakes region’s most comprehensive needs inventory was released in 2005. The Bush administration failed to fund hardly any of that new work because of the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Gulf coast, and other issues that took precedence. Then President Obama, while campaigning for office in 2008, pledged at least $5 billion in new spending for the lakes. But White House budgets for Obama’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative have fallen far off pace.

Now comes news that cash-strapped Environment Canada has been cutting jobs en masse. Some 300 Environment Canada scientists and staff were told last summer their jobs would be eliminated, and another 400 learned theirs could be on the chopping block.

Money, of course, is always an object. Those woes won’t be resolved with handshakes, back pats and lofty talk of a new era of cooperation when the United States and Canada sign their new Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Neither will data gaps, which exist in several key areas of research.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. But in recent years, Great Lakes scientists have lamented about data gaps in the areas of sewage plants unable to treat all pharmaceutical waste, in phosphorus runoff that leads to algae, in mercury depositions from the air that settle in water and make some fish hazardous to eat, and in reporting chemical spills.

In 2009, a year before negotiations for the new agreement began in earnest in 2010, Howard Frumkin implored the International Association of Great Lakes Researchers to find more links between lake ecology and human health, especially in the area of climate change — which, even today, remains a politically divisive, if not explosive, issue on Capitol Hill. Frumkin, now dean of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, was at the time director of the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In other words, someone who knows a thing or two about data gaps.

Tiny Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio, may not have the highest name recognition, but its National Center for Water Quality Research has become somewhat of a legend for the agricultural-runoff data it has generated for Great Lakes scientists since the 1970s, especially along the region’s largest tributary, the Maumee River. Yet even with record phosphorus runoffs and record algae outbreaks, the latter of which have wreaked havoc on Ohio’s recreation, tourism and lakefront property values, the center struggles to continue its work through a patchwork of grants each year. It scraped up enough last year but in the fall of 2010 — six months before the 2011 sampling season began — it had lined up only half of what it needed.

The IJC itself reported in the fall of 2006 — five years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — that real-time information about oil and chemical spills that foul the water was still lacking, an issue that goes beyond environmental altruism and touched upon national security for the two countries.

Pollution from pharmaceuticals remains one of the greatest unknowns, with sewage treatment plants unable to detect or treat things from nasal drugs to steroids that get disposed. They end up in rivers and streams that flow out to the lakes, potentially causing a variety of health effects even at low concentrations.

“It’s ongoing and it’s mind-boggling,” David Pitts, a Wayne State University pharmacology professor said at the University of Toledo College of Law’s annual Great Lakes Water Conference in 2010.

A co-panelist, Jeffrey Lape, deputy director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Science and Technology, said it will be a long time “before our comfort level can be satisfied.” He said he knows of no wastewater treatment plant that discharges water free of pharmaceutical pollution. “The fact is we’re producing this stuff far faster than we can possibly understand what their impacts are,” Lape said.

Three years ago, scientists attending the International Association of Great Lakes Researchers conference in Toledo said the time had come to move on to a new suite of chemicals and a broader array of studies about how the lakes can affect human health, both physically and psychologically. At an IJC biennial in the late 1990s, the complexities of Lake Erie’s spawning habitat was described as one of the research community’s greatest data gaps.

The sheer existence of Great Lakes data gaps in 2012 is a bit surprising when one considers that the Great Lakes region is one of the most intensely researched ecosystems on the planet, where many of the modern pollution laws that grew out of the first Earth Day in 1970 began.

But the data gaps humble scientists, which raises questions about how much the two countries can reasonably expect from another international agreement to work together if they’re both short on money and still trying to get their arms around the issues.

Some environmental groups are miffed they weren’t allowed to observe negotiations in progress — they weren’t allowed in the room for negotiations that led to past agreements, either.

The bottom line is there is still a lot of work to do. Problems on both sides of the border remain. It’ll take a real financial commitment and more than just money.

But a new agreement is overdue. Davis said this one will include stronger language to help tackle nutrients that threaten public health, recreation and the ecosystem itself, with western Lake Erie receiving a special focus. We’re also promised more proactive approaches to invasive species, climate change and habitat restoration.

Let’s hope this new Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is more than just window dressing. Fresh water is becoming more coveted globally. It’s hard to imagine what the ramifications will be if substantial progress isn’t made before the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement gets its next facelift.