The University of Michigan has been awarded $5 million dollars by the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
That money is to establish a Global Center for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters and fund it for five years.
That center will be based at the University of Michigan, but Cornell University, the College of Menominee Nation, the Red Lake Nation, and the University of Wisconsin are partners in the effort.
Canada will provide an additional $2.75 million (USD). That will fund partnerships with McMaster University, Toronto Metropolitan University, the Six Nations of the Grant River, Brock University, and Wilfrid Laurier University.
“We have an opportunity to not just take what we've learned from the Great Lakes and extrapolate it to other parts of the world. But we're going to have an opportunity to learn about cutting edge science, climate science, science on community adaptation and bring that to the Great Lakes,” said Andrew Gronewold, who will lead the center at the University of Michigan.
A news release from the university stated that communities must learn to adapt to climate change, but the tools and knowledge needed for adaptation are “often either nonexistent, fragmented across jurisdictional boundaries or simply to difficult to access or use.
Gronewold said in an interview that researchers in the Great Lakes region have a lot of knowledge about lakes.
“We can translate what we learn through this research in the Center to other lakes and waterbodies around the world, but ultimately to any freshwater body that crosses a political boundary.”
