Executive Director of the Water Institute and Professor of Economics Roy Brouwer recently presented work on an integrated water accounting system for the Great Lakes to a Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) hosted meeting in Montreal. The accounting framework was presented to workshop participants from government, non-government, academia and the public interested in environmental sustainability within North American industry, including Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and the US EPA. Brouwer was invited by ECCC to discuss the use of Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) in the Great Lakes water accounts.
The research aims to develop an integrated water accounting system for the Great Lakes and assign economic values to different forms of water use. The importance of the water resources in the Great Lakes Basin to the economy of Ontario, Canada and the US is vital. Brouwer and his group try to quantify this.
“There is increasing policymaker demand for the economic value of water. This information system allows us to assess possible trade-offs and synergies between economic growth and the pressure this growth exerts on our water environment”
The integrated accounting system connects available economic and physical water data sources at different spatial scales, from individual sub-basins like Lake Erie and Lake Ontario to the Great Lakes basin and the Province as a whole. Preliminary results were presented, including the value added generated by various water-related economic sectors across the Great Lakes. In a next step, the presented accounting framework will be extended to include available data over a longer period of time to conduct time series analysis.
Roy Brouwer, Executive Director of the Water Institute presenting at the February Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) meeting in Montreal.
(CEC) meeting participants.