The Great Lakes Region (GLR), specifically Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, and Uganda, faces persistent challenges related to forced displacement and refugee crises. This report examines the role of social protection systems in addressing the multifaceted needs of...

This paper offers an empirical study to explore the relationship between transportation modalities and environmental concerns, promoting the adoption of synchromodality as a strategic pathway to achieving sustainable freight transport. The study uses a synchromodal freight transportation...

"Weaving together the stories and voices of residents, anglers, community leaders, and environmental workers and researchers, this compelling account details the lives and livelihoods impacted by a once-unrivaled Michigan salmon fishery. From the introduction of Chinook salmon to the Great Lakes...

Small-scale cross-border trade (SSCBT) is a defining feature of the economies of the borderlands of the Great Lakes Region (GLR). It is an important source of income and a necessary channel to access goods and services that have enabled vulnerable households to increase their resilience against...

This project explores capital markets risk exposure from water use in key industrial sectors in the Great Lakes region, represented by a subset of the region's largest companies and water users. The largest industrial water users in the Great Lakes region include (in decreasing order):...

The striking vastness of the world’s largest surface freshwater resource, the Laurentian Great Lakes, has generated the fallacy that they are not highly vulnerable to climate change. This fallacy has created a great lapse in our research and understanding of the effects of climate change on...

This article places Great Lakes environmental governance in the larger legal context of the purported “myth” of transboundary environmental harm prevention. After setting out this comparative framework, the article discusses the role of public participation in environmental governance –...

Presidential attempts to extend term limits in the Great Lakes region have resuscitated a debate over their impact on security. But beyond these presidential predicaments, questions have been raised over the erosion of democratic accountability across the region.

At the end of 2013, there were about 3.3 million people who remained forcibly displaced within the Great Lakes Region (GLR) of Africa. Of these, 82 percent were internally displaced persons (IDPs) and 18 percent refugees; 64 percent were under 18 years old. This Report analyzes the extent,...

Public participation has become a standard component of environmental decision-making processes. Frequently used methods of public involvement, such as public comments and hearings, however, are too often reactive in nature, involve insufficient deliberation, and engage only a small number of...

The virtual water content of food needs to be understood and regulated, due to the vast amount of water involved in food production. Virtual water is the total amount of water used to produce a product. Such water consumption has been coined “virtual,” because the water use is hidden,...

This article provides a brief overview of hydraulic fracturing regulation in United States and Canada, with a focus on the state of Michigan and the province of Ontario. It then discusses the ban on new and increased diversions of Great Lakes water in the Agreement and the Compact, and how this...

The paper surveys the evolution of two international environmental agreements originating in the 1970s and intended to promote water quality. Both the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the Barcelona Convention system respecting the Mediterranean have adapted to newly acknowledged...

In the wake of the Gulf oil blowout disaster, there is renewed interest in protecting the freshwater of the Great Lakes from the risks of oil drilling. The region has significant oil resources that would be economically and technologically accessible through drilling in the Great Lakes. The...

Since 1985, the eight Great Lakes states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have cooperated to prevent almost all diversions of water from the Great Lakes basin. In 2005, the eight states signed an Agreement to create a tiered system of reviews for diversions and a draft interstate...

This article is a study of the then proposed 1971 U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the long history of developing U.S.- Canadian cooperation that preceded it. The article suggests that this experience: (1) offers guidance for the solution of problems that other programs of...

There is a lot of excellent academic, policy and practice work on the links between natural resources and conflict. There are still different viewpoints in the field of the exact relationship of resources to conflict, as people have summed up as the distinction between greed and grievance....

Despite the complexities of climatology, certain consistent themes emerge with implications for water availability: as the world gets warmer, it will experience increased regional variability in precipitation, more frequent heavy precipitation events, becoming more susceptible to drought. This...

This Article explains that Great Lakes water is a commons and a public trust; this water should be delivered as a freely accessible public good for domestic use; and the United States and Canada should not allow private corporations to take Great Lakes trust water out of the public commons...

This article presents a new model for environmental policy, called cooperative horizontal federalism. The cooperative horizontal federalism approach utilizes a constitutional mechanism for states to bind themselves to common substantive and procedural environmental protection standards,...

For scholars of international law and international dispute resolution, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact and Agreement may seem a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they promise environmental cooperation and management of the Great Lakes at an unprecedented scale....

"Farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted them too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint - critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded...

The shores of the Great Lakes are a battleground, and their future use is shrouded in uncertainty and controversy. Lakefront owners, armed with their deeds, assert an exclusive right to use their properties at least down to the water's edge. Members of the public, brandishing the venerable but...

The aftermath of the April 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has caused the United States to reevaluate its energy production. In the wake of the tragic oil spill, now known to be the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history, a new...

The Great Lakes are an enormous and precious source of fresh water on earth. Although water such as that in the Great Lakes has long been viewed as a public good, some private companies are seeing huge profits from bottling and selling water from the Great Lakes ecosystem. Concern about such...

Few other regions in the world have been hit so hard by so many wars and domestic conflicts as the countries in the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa over the past fifteen years. Traders and brokers of small arms cool-headedly spotted the opportunities in these regions. Local demand was...

Attention to the need for greater stakeholder involvement in environmental decisionmaking has been increasing in recent years. The authors draw on a number of cases of environmental planning in the Great Lakes Region in an attempt to understand the possible benefits stakeholder processes can...

The International Joint Commission was established by the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty to assist the governments of the US and Canada in preventing and resolving disputes along their border. Since the signing of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972, the Commission and the two...