How are the Great Lakes today?
One of the goals of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was to make the waters “drinkable”, “swimmable” and “fishable”. The International Joint Commission is required to report on progress towards the goals of the agreement every two years. Despite decades of research and work to improve the Great Lakes, the most recent IJC Report, the Eleventh Biennial Report on Great Lakes Water Quality, issued in September 2002, found that greater efforts must be invested by both countries in order to realize any real improvements. The IJC requested that the governments of Canada and the United States use a system of biological indicators to monitor the health of the lakes. Based on these indicators, the IJC deemed the drinkability of treated Great Lakes water as “good”. With respect to fishability, the chemical contamination of edible fish was described as “mixed, improving”. The improvement was based on very slow declines in the concentrations of PCBs in fish samples, although warnings are sti
