In the bi-national Great Lakes Basin, the Great Lakes Charter Annex commits the eight governors of the U.S. States and the two premieres of the Canadian provinces to manage the system as an integral whole, recognizing that development decisions by any one jurisdiction affect the ecological health of the entire watershed.
NHI is working with local partners Cornell University, the Nature Conservancy, and the Toronto & Region Conservation Authority to develop a process and set of analytical tools to identify the most feasible and ecologically beneficial restoration opportunities in Lake Ontario as the first step toward a basin-wide system to reliably predict ecosystem benefits that will result from restoration investments.
Our approach involves development and application of a hydroecological planning tool, augmented by an interactive process for considering socio-economic constraints. These tools provide a basis for determining which restoration efforts are most likely to yield desired ecological outcomes and which can be achieved most cost-effectively, especially as shared objectives of several agencies or management jurisdictions. The project evaluates a broad scope of improvement projects — including virtually all types of water-dependent natural resources that have been altered or degraded in the basin — that can be implemented by a full range of actors in the basin including: permitting agencies at the national, state/provincial or local levels; permit applicants needing to mitigate project impacts; conservation organizations and local communities wishing to undertake ecological restoration activities; and, eventually, mitigation bankers seeking to invest in projects that can satisfy permit or regulatory requirements.
The outcome of this project will be a replicable framework, complete with a decision support analytical tool and a process for its utilization, to be made available throughout the entire Great Lakes region.
Contact: Gregory Thomas
