Assessing Equity and Environmental Justice in the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative

Abstract

Since its inception in 2010, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) program has completed more than 5,300 restoration projects across the larger Great Lakes region, representing a ~$2.7 billion federal investment. This bipartisan federal effort annually appropriates $300 million across the GLRI’s five main focus areas, with one-third of this investment supporting the 43 most polluted sites in the Great Lakes basin—those identified through the Area of Concern (AOC) program back in the 1970s. In the last decade, the GLRI program has demonstrated significant ecological and economic successes, with much progress being made towards delisting AOCs. Despite these environmental and economic successes, there is little documented evaluation of whether the GLRI program has served to minimize environmental risk and remediate legacies of environmental inequities. Few studies have examined social equity within the GLRI program, even though the initiative was formed to accelerate the restoration of the Great Lakes ecosystem and ensure a sustainable water-based future for the region. Groups like the Healing Our Waters—Great Lakes (HOW) Coalition, who work to educate members of Congress and the public about the far-reaching benefits of GLRI funding, have begun investigating how the program both considers and impacts social equity in its restoration work throughout the region. Specifically, HOW is interested in learning about how federal GLRI investments can be best implemented so that the benefits of restoration reach the full spectrum of Great Lakes socio-economic groups in an equitable manner. We began this inquiry into emphasizing social equity across the GLRI. We aimed to illustrate how equity considerations need to play a critical role in the ongoing revitalization of the Great Lakes region and provided recommendations for ways HOW can advocate for equitybased policy and administrative considerations within the GLRI program. Our recommendations stemmed from case studies of four different AOCs in Michigan: White Lake, Muskegon Lake, the Rouge and Detroit rivers, and the River Raisin. Semi-structured participatory interview methods were used to build a clearer understanding of how communities have been impacted by their impaired freshwater resources, and how they perceive equity outcomes and considerations in current and past restoration efforts. In addition, ArcGIS geo-visualization software was used to map the distribution of GLRI restoration projects with social demographics for each study AOC community in order to illustrate social equity patterns and disparities and supplement community interview insights. Our recommendations delineate actions the HOW Coalition can pursue with community organizations across the Great Lakes region, and equity considerations that HOW can advocate for at the federal level. Recommendations for HOW’s federal advocacy work are further broken down into congressional policy recommendations and EPA program administration recommendations.