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CEA in the News |
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Pandemic opens up great green opportunities for Great Lakes Doug Schmidt • Windsor Star / September 4, 2020 A multimillion-dollar rehabilitation project now underway along the American bottom of the Detroit River is just a small example of the potentially huge benefits the Great Lakes region could enjoy through post-pandemic investments. As senior governments hunt for the biggest and best bang-for-the-buck scenarios to rev up COVID-ravaged economies, scientists, business leaders and environmentalists argue that accelerating the work on ready-to-go Great Lakes cleanup projects would be an effective use of public funds designated for economic stimulus. And they claim to now have the proof. “Connect the dots — cleanups lead to restoration of habitat, which leads to reconnecting people to our greenways and blueways, which then leads to community economic revitalization,” said John Hartig, co-author of a recent study that calculated the widespread and long-term economic benefits attached to such investments. With Windsor’s popular riverfront park serving as the model, more than $100 million was invested over a decade in kickstarting the Detroit RiverWalk that will eventually open a nearly nine-kilometre stretch between Belle Isle and the Ambassador Bridge to pedestrians and other forms of active transportation. That effort in reclaiming downtown Detroit’s waterfront from a heavy industrial legacy stretching back to the 19th century triggered more than $1 billion worth of private and public investments during the same period, targeting urban residential, retail and recreational development. This fall, in a partnership between the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, two toxic riverbed hotspots — one west of the MacArthur Bridge connection to Belle Isle and the other near the former Joe Louis Arena — will be capped under layers of activated carbon, sand, gravel and larger rip-rap (rock used to armour shorelines). The polluted river sediment is too poisonous to be dug up or otherwise disturbed, but neutralizing them under a thick protective cover will then permit further expansion of the adjacent RiverWalk, triggering more job creation through residential, commercial and tourism development. There are many more long-identified remediation projects waiting to be launched or completed on both sides of the border across the Great Lakes basin, all designed to improve the environment, and, according to a new report, local economies. “Investing in cleanup means investing in the revitalization of communities — it’s smart,” said Hartig, a Michigan-based scientist and visiting scholar at the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research who has been involved in basin remedial action plans since their genesis more than three decades ago. Hartig co-authored a recently published report in the Journal of Great Lakes Research that tabulated the taxpayer costs so far of the cleanup bill to address historic environmental impairments at 43 “areas of concern” identified across the Great Lakes basin, including the Detroit River. “I was shocked. It was, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a huge figure,'” Hartig said of the $30 billion spent by governments on both sides of the border between 1985 and 2019 to address a legacy of pollution across the basin. But that total expenditure also only represents “a small investment” when compared to the Great Lakes region’s annual gross domestic product of over $7 trillion (if the region were a separate country it would have the third-largest economy in the world after the USA and China). And for each dollar spent on Great Lakes cleanup and remediation, more than three dollars in additional economic activity is created, according to another study by Michigan economists for the Great Lakes Commission and the Council of Great Lakes Industries. “It makes absolutely great sense to take further action on the Great Lakes,” said Dwight Duncan, senior strategic advisor at McMillan LLP and board chairman of the Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority, overseeing the $5.7-billion Gordie Howe International Bridge project. The long-time former Windsor politician was Ontario’s finance minister more than a decade ago when Canada was hit by the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Governments intervened quickly and in a big way at the time with publicly funded projects designed to keep economies afloat, and many see the current global COVID-19 pandemic as requiring a similar large-scale assist. And advocates see big potential in targeting projects already on the to-do lists of governments on both sides of the border in a region where nearly a third of American and Canadian economic activity is centred. “It will create jobs in the short-term — in the longer term, it improves productivity,” said Duncan. With the need to act quickly, so-called “shovel-ready” projects already identified in the dozens of Great Lakes “remedial action plans” currently awaiting funding, he said, “that might be an area, hopefully, where governments look at.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government delivers a new throne speech on Sept. 23 which is expected to focus on a transition from pandemic emergency assistance to short-term action on post-pandemic job creation. Ottawa is looking, in part, on the need to spend on “green infrastructure” as a way to both help Canada out of its COVID-19 economic slump and for the country to reach its carbon reduction commitments in the global fight against climate change. Duncan told the Star that he has had informal discussions with federal officials and that Infrastructure and Communities Minister Catherine McKenna has queried him on “my views on working with the province.” Based on past and current practices, any major push on Great Lakes “green-friendly projects” must be a collaborative approach between the federal and provincial governments, he and others indicate. “We’ve been very clear — these are wise investments,” said Matthew Doss, a policy advisor with the binational Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, of which Windsor and Essex County are members. Due to COVID-19, he said, “cities have been really hurt hard,” and have been lobbying governments to open the spending taps on such green investments as sewage treatment plant upgrades and stormwater and other anti-flooding infrastructure improvements. Doss said his organization estimates that, on the Canadian side alone, a $7-billion investment now in municipal water infrastructure and erosion mitigation would generate about 115,000 jobs. Most of those job openings, a Canadian advisor told the Star, would be for low-skilled workers, meaning they could be filled by those displaced by COVID-19. “It’s critical that our federal governments provide some kind of bridge funding until we get through this COVID,” Doss said. “It would fuel larger national recoveries — this region is the economic engine for our two countries.” The report on Great Lakes restoration efforts that she co-authored with Hartig provides “the empirical proof — investing in the environment creates economic growth,” said Gail Krantzberg, another long-time Great Lakes researcher and a professor at McMaster University’s engineering and public policy program. “This report shows clearly the benefits — it’s not just a feel-good (investment in the environment). The physical and mental health benefits are indisputable for humans,” she said. “If you want to create jobs now — this is it.” The public spending in cleaning up Hamilton Harbour, another area of concern and the most toxic spot on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes, has reached about $1.8 billion, but Krantzberg said that figure will be dwarfed by the future returns on the investment, including in property taxes, and that’s just on the economic side of the equation. “It’s absolutely fabulous what’s happening in Hamilton Harbour … the recovery has been remarkable,” she said, with bald eagles returning to nest and the fish population rebounding. Toronto and Mississauga, said Krantzberg, are other examples where big remediation investments currently underway are returning waterfront lands from their heavily polluted and “esthetically disgusting” post-industrial pasts. Krantzberg and Hartig said it took decades of consulting, planning and lobbying to get the actual physical work of the Great Lakes cleanups started but momentum has been building, particularly as the positive economics are being added to the equation. Reversing generations of environmental degradation across the world’s largest freshwater body is work that still has to be done, but “the evidence shows that there’s a return on investment through remediation projects,” said Derek Coronado, the Windsor-based executive director of Citizens Environmental Alliance. Coronado said he hopes the current discussions on a post-pandemic “green recovery” go beyond simple remediation of past mistakes, “so we don’t have to revisit this again in the future.” Real change, according to Coronado, can be found in such documents at Windsor’s 2017-approved community energy plan which focuses on taking a less polluting path forward on economic growth. The CEA supports the International Institute for Sustainable Development think tank’s recently published “Green Strings” report listing “principles and conditions for a green recovery from COVID-19 in Canada.” The first of those strings is a call on government to make any financial support to industry contingent on the recipient working towards a zero-emission transition. Mark Wallace, president and CEO of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy which is leading the effort to build that city’s RiverWalk, said COVID-19 has served to highlight the importance of public spaces when it comes to physical and mental well-being for urban residents. “Public space investment is a very efficient way of changing the quality of life for the broadest segment of the community,” said Wallace. More than $2 billion has been spent on environmental remediation projects on both sides of the border over the past three decades to improve such “beneficial use impairments” in the Detroit River area of concern as beach closures and restrictions on fish consumption. Even before COVID-19 and the most recent announcement of this fall’s toxic sediment capping project in the Detroit River and the RiverWalk expansion, Wallace — citing such urban public amenities as Chicago’s shoreline Millennium Park and New York City’s High Line elevated linear park — said “a renaissance for public space” is being experienced in our cities “that is having a profound impact” on how people there live. Wallace said what helped get the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy launched in the early-2000s — and, with it, serious efforts to reclaim the downtown shoreline — were envious glances across the border. “A lot of our community leaders were jealous about Windsor’s waterfront. Windsor’s investment there definitely illustrated a lot of vision — it’s a beautiful amenity,” he said. Getting outside and staying healthy, both physically and mentally, is the best defence against a flu pandemic, Wallace said. Public spaces, he added, provide communities with “resilience during times of great crisis.” THE GREAT LAKES:
List of impairments in Great Lakes areas of concern:
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