Healthy Great Lakes, Communities, and Wildlife

If you can clearly see your home from outer space, you live in a special place. Here at the Great Lakes Regional Center, we are privileged to live in a region that provides so much to enhance our quality of life. Most of all, we enjoy abundant fresh water (95% of all freshwater in North America and 20% of the worlds freshwater). If you were to dump out all five of the Great Lakes across all of North America, you would fill up the Grand Canyon and submerge the rest of the continent. That’s the enormity of this iconic natural resource.

Working together with our state affiliates and other partners over the past year, the National Wildlife Federations Great Lakes Regional Center have witnessed significant progress in protecting and restoring our Great Lakes, but much more needs to be done. Even with the historic increased federal funding these last two years that has allowed states and the federal government to address some key issues, including water infrastructure and the cleanup of contaminated sites, we still have too many communities without access to clean water and increasing loss of wildlife habitat. Invasive species continue to threaten our waters and wildlife, excessive nutrient runoff continues to negatively affect our water quality, and toxic forever chemicals like PFAS continue to impact our communities and drinking water. 

In our 2024 Great Lakes Federal Policy Priorities, we’ve identified the top five opportunities for Congress and the Administration to address these challenges. For the upcoming year, Congress and the administration must pass a budget that provides states with adequate federal resources to repair our aging water infrastructure; pass a strong Farm Bill that enhances private land conservation and reduce the flow of nutrient pollution into the lakes; maintain efforts to combat the spread of invasive species like invasive carp; and provide funding and reauthorization for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to continue support cleaning up our waters for people and wildlife.

Each year, National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center develops a comprehensive federal Great Lakes policy agenda. Our top five priorities for Congress and the Administration are:

PROTECT OUR NATURAL RESOURCES AND WILDLIFE

SAFEGUARD OUR DRINKING WATER

RESTORE REGIONAL WATER RESOURCES

PROTECT PUBLIC LANDS AND WILDLIFE

ADVANCE CLIMATE SOLUTIONS AND RESILIENCY

The priorities above are non-partisan and enjoy broad support from a diverse set of communities throughout the Great Lakes. Our role at NWF is to help keep these Great Lakes protected for our kids, their kids, and future generations. Therefore, we urge our region’s Congressional leaders to demonstrate their support for the Great Lakes, our region’s water resources, and the people, businesses, and wildlife that depend on them.