Midwest

What Does a More Variable Climate Mean for Great Lakes Communities: Why a more variable climate matters to your community.

This factsheet includes information about: 

• Air Temperature
• Lake Levels
• Precipitation
• Understanding the Difference Between Mitigation and Adaptation

In the Great Lakes region, climate change is likely to bring more intense rainstorms, and with them, more flooding. For the City of Detroit, flooding brings an added problem: sewage overflows. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s (DWSD) Wastewater Treatment Plant is the largest singlesite wastewater treatment facility in the U.S. Detroit has combined sewers, meaning that sewage and stormwater runoff run together through a single collection system.

A primer on climate change and adaptation which includes climate variability and change in the Great Lakes region, climate impacts to plants, animals, and people, and a getting started on climate adaptation section.

The Great Lakes region is home to 20 percent of the world’s freshwater reserves, a rich array of species and habitats, and tens of millions of people. One of the most significant challenges to the well-being of the region is climate change. We are already feeling the effects of climate change, and those effects will only intensify in the future. As a result the past alone is no longer a sufficient guide for conservation decisions.

The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) is an intertribal natural resource agency that assists its 11 member Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa, or Anishinaabe) tribes in the implementation and protection of off-reservation treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather in territories ceded (or sold) to the United States.

The Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians resides in the northeast corner of Minnesota along Lake Superior. The dynamic environs of the region host a wide array of birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles. Unprecedented warming of Lake Superior in recent years suggests that climate change is taking effect around Grand Portage and is threatening local wildlife species. One of the Grand Portage Band's major concerns is that climate change may lead to the loss of culturally significant subsistence species including moose and brook trout in the Lake Superior region.

The Potawatomi tribe has long experience in melding traditional wisdom with political and practical approaches to ecological stewardship. Three decades ago, when the Exxon Corp. decided to open the world's largest copper-zinc mine 15 miles south of the Potawatomi Tribe's northeastern Wisconsin land (they also own land in the Milwaukee area, for a total of nearly 19,000 acres), on the doorsteps of two other Great Lakes-region tribes, the Potawatomi Community was faced with a fundamental threat. With guidance from their elders, they chose to act.

The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, located in northeastern Minnesota, is striving to reduce its carbon footprint and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Sustainability, energy efficiency, and the development of renewable energy are key goals, and the Band aims to protect the reservation and its resources for the cultural, spiritual, and physical well-being of its people.

Large-scale environmental change in the form of human-driven alteration of the climate is here. Global emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased dramatically over the last 150 years. Researchers throughout the world agree that these changes can be attributed primarily to human activities such as the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. The resulting presence of these gases in the atmosphere has led to a number of changes in global, regional, and local climatic conditions.