Obama's Great Lakes Advisor Sees Program As "Climate Change Adaptation Effort"

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CLEVELAND -- Cameron Davis, Great Lakes 'czar' for the Obama administration, said today that climate change will drive future clean-up efforts on the lakes. "I look at the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative as a climate change adaptation effort," Davis said in Cleveland this afternoon at a press briefing at the Great Lakes Science Center prior to the final public hearing of the a federal task force on oceans and the Great Lakes. "Everything that we're trying to do -- we, meaning the EPA and its 15 federal partners -- is designed to address the kind of stressors that we're likely to see coming to the Great Lakes as a result of climate change."

The Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force was created in June by President Obama and was charged with developing a national policy on the protection, restoration and maintenance of the U.S. coasts -- including the Great Lakes. Members were in Cleveland today to hear from the public and interested groups about problems and solutions regarding Lake Erie and the other four lakes. Davis, formerly the head of the Chicago-based environmental advocacy group Alliance for the Great Lakes, was appointed by U.S. EPA head Lisa Jackson earlier this year to be her senior advisor on issues on the lakes.

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is not directly and immediately linked to the work of the task force, which will make its final report to the president in December. But the Initiative, placed in the president's budget and now under consideration in Congress, represents the newest and most comprehensvie among dozens of environnmental efforts to protect the lakes -- which hold about 20 percent of the available fresh water in the world.

Davis referred to the Initiative -- a $475 million proposal by the Obama Administration to address a comprehensive Great Lakes cleanup -- as a "down payment" on fixing the ills on the lakes. "We know we have to restore habitat," Davis said. "We know we have to prevent more invasive species from getting into the Great Lakes because when climate change is upon us it is probably going to provide a more conducive environment for invasive species in the future. I don't think you can separate climate change from the focus areas of the Great Lakes Initiative."

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http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/10/obama_epa_advisor_to_great_lak.html