Summit for Great Lakes Freshwater Leadership
The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program’s Great Lakes Economic Initiative, in partnership with a network of academic, public policy, business and civic organizations including the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland and NorTech, the Northeast Technology Coalition, has initiated a freshwater initiative to position the Great Lakes region as a leader in freshwater research and technology.
The Brookings Institution, joined by co-hosts the Great Lakes Science Center and the Great Lakes Commission, will hold a regional convening at the Great Llakes Science Center in Cleveland to discuss the region’s assets and challenges for emerging as a freshwater leader. This will be a working conference, the first of two, bringing together representatives from the freshwater industry, research, education, and policy to share their expertise in exploring the potential for such an initiative.
John Austin, Non-Resident Senior Fellow for the Brookings Institution, joined by Victoria Pebbles, Program Manager for the Great Lakes Commission, along with project co-hosts, partners and funders will conduct the briefing.
While leading the agricultural and industrial revolutions, today the Great Lakes region faces significant challenges making the transition to leadership in a global, knowledge economy. The goal of this project is to identify the core competencies available in the region – industry and business leadership, infrastructure capacity, natural abundance of freshwater, leading national and international research institutions and labs, human capital, and experiential know-how in cooperation and collaboration across multiple sectors and jurisdictions – that can serve as a foundation for enabling the Great Lakes region to emerge as a leader in freshwater research, technology and industry. The fruits of this discussion will provide direction and substance for a position paper that can serve to inform and catalyze a needed discussion among the region’s business, civic and state/provincial political leadership to engage the region’s Congressional delegation federal decisionmakers, and aspirants for President in 2008 around a winning economic vision for the Great Lakes region.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Wonderful news, maybe. How about some regional work on something that would also make a difference in thousands of lives now? Like helping ensure that sewage and overflow doesn’t end up in the lake, creating days when hundreds of thousands of NEO residents can’t enjoy what few public beaches we have around Cleveland? Boosting our region’s efforts to keep the Lake and its tributaries clean would show lots of residents a meaningful impact of regionalism.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
John,
You hit the nail on the head. We’ve been working here on just those issues, especially how policy/regulatory changes might affect the way developers construct their sites in order to avoid the *true* cost of combined sewage overflows…call me, you’ll like how this is unfolding!