Bi-national assessment of the Great Lakes: SOLEC partnerships

Many administrative jurisdictions have authority over parts of the Great Lakes, sometimes with competing purposes as well as governance at differing scales of time and space. As demand increases for high quality information that is relevant to environmental managers, environmental and natural resource agencies with limited budgets must look to interdisciplinary, collaborative approaches for the collection, analysis and reporting of data. The State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conferences (SOLEC) were begun in 1994 in response to reporting requirements of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between Canada and the U.S. The biennial conferences provide independent, science-based reporting on the state of health of the Great Lakes ecosystem components. A suite of indicators necessary and sufficient to assess Great Lakes ecosystem status was introduced in 1998, and assessments based on a subset of the indicators were presented in 2000. Because SOLEC is a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional reporting venue, the SOLEC indicators require acceptance by a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the Great Lakes basin. The SOLEC indicators list is expected to provide the basis for government agencies and other organizations to collaborate more effectively and to allocate resources to data collection, evaluation and reporting on the state of the Great Lakes basin ecosystem.     

The Great Lakes, an Ecosystem Rehabilitated, But Still Under Threat

Since 1972, the Parties (United States and Canada, 1987) to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement have been working collaboratively to achieve the purpose of the Agreement “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the waters of the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem”. Billions of dollars and countless person – hours have been expended towards this end, but have the Parties, and their numerous collaborators at the state, provincial, and municipal levels, along with industry and citizen activists achieved meaningful results? This paper will examine the information provided through various monitoring programs and will assess the success of the Parties' programs, and will also discuss the continuing threats to achieving the purpose of the Agreement.