Seamless

More than 100 million people in the United States and Canada rely on the Great Lakes Basin for their livelihoods—in  agriculture, manufacturing, boating, and tourism, to name just a few industries. Anchored by two of the world’s largest cities—Chicago and Toronto—the Basin is home to more than one-fifth of the globe’s fresh surface water and generates $5 trillion a year in gross domestic product. If it were a country, it would be the fourth largest economy on the planet.

But invasive species, climate change, contaminants, and a manufacturing industry that largely fled in the 1970s and 1980s have all put pressure on one of North America’s greatest natural resources, threatening to destabilize the region’s economy in years to come.

Enter the Transborder Research University Network for Water Stewardship—an international partnership of more than 20 Canadian and U.S. research institutions trying to envision how those pressures might affect the basin 20, 30, even 50 years from now. The network, organized six years ago by the University of Toronto and Michigan’s Wayne State University, expects this summer to release best-case and worst-case scenarios for the Basin in coming years and to provide potential remedies for everything from changing weather patterns to economic pressures to biological and chemical pollution.

“University networks have become very popular in recent years in the world of international education,” said John Wood, senior associate vice provost for international education at the University at Buffalo, which is a member of the network, called “TRUN” for short. “Everyone sees the value of