The United States and Canada share a multitude of watersheds along their more than 5,500 miles of border, but regulations and rules may not be sufficient to deal with the modern problems that are not considered in decades-old treaties.

by Vanessa Balintec and Lily Burris

Canada and the United States of America have built a long standing partnership when it comes to tackling shared environmental concerns. Their initial agreements were successful in abating early environmental damage and are credited for setting up the basic foundation of environmental protection and collaboration. However, concerns of their effectiveness and adaptation have arisen amongst citizens and organizations today, raising the question: are the two countries doing enough to protect their waters? 

Douglas Macdonald, senior lecturer at the University of Toronto, says the need to take care of transboundary bodies of water is what leads to things like the formation of the International Joint Commission and the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. This, along with the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1972 (GLWQA), amended in 2012, are the core agreements in regulating water use and protecting water environments. 

“The problems are important – the driving dynamic is countries have to see that they can’t solve the problems by themselves that will need them to cooperate,” said Macdonald. “But secondly, they’re very leery about entering into agreements that would really force them to do a lot beyond what they are already doing.”

Where are we today?

Measurable action has been taken to reduce areas of concern that are shared between both countries. According to Toronto-based York university professor Mark Winfield, the initial actions of the agreements showed a promising trend toward prevention and mitigation in keeping the waters clean, specifically in the Great Lakes, where over 3,500 species of plants and animals live, and provides basin drinking water for around 23 million people on both sides of the border.

“The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, especially in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, had a pretty huge impact in terms of efforts to clean up the lakes in those decades and federal money flowed into mediation and basic municipal sewage treatment dealing with agricultural runoff.” said Winfield. 

Recent success comes from setting phosphorus reduction targets for Lake Erie, which has been the biggest contributor to harmful algal blooms, reinvigorating research and activity into binational conservation strategies, and successfully delisting multiple areas of concern located within the Great Lakes. 

But some say progress has been slow.

“The problem is that the kind of last major activity was years ago –  a lot of this initial momentum is lost,” said Winfield. “When there’s been engagement and interest, the impact of these agreements has been significant. The problem has been relatively little engagement on either side.”

Today, successes are overshadowed by the multitude of complex problems modern society faces. Algal blooms, plastic and waste pollution, invasive species, and water unusable for drinking, swimming, and fishing are just some of the mounting problems that the Great Lakes face, and the International Joint Commission, the binational organization tasked with facilitating transboundary action, stated in its 2017 Highlights Report that both countries are “living with the costly consequences of past failures to anticipate and prevent environmental problems.” 

What bodies of government are responsible for overseeing these agreements?

The Environmental Protection Agency and Environment and Climate Change Canada are the governmental groups that work with one another on environmental issues within each country by researching and monitoring issues like air, water, climate change and pollution. They often work through the binational organization the IJC, which has two main powers of construction approval and research and monitoring of issues, says Frank Bevacqua, public information officer for the IJC.

“When we get involved, when the IJC is asked to study a pollution issue, for example, we set up an international study board that has equal members of US and Canadian participants,” said Bevacqua. “Everyone has access to all the data in both countries, so there’s a high degree of cooperation and trust that you don’t always see in other international situations.”

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Through these institutions, agreements and treaties are filtered through domestic policy, which has been drastically changing each year.

Recent years have been seen rising emissions, lack of environmental law enforcement and policy rollbacks, particularly in the United States. New changes being made by the administration of US President Donald Trump see a vast deregulation agenda on environmental protections, many of which include weakening pollution regulation and prevention strategies. 

Said law changes are something that can impede on progress between the two countries, as it can already be a challenge to demonstrate impacts being made on either side of the border.

“In order to get action from the United States, we normally have to demonstrate that there’s been some harm on our side of the boundary,” said Steve Cobham, manager of Canada and U.S. Relations at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “It makes it difficult to have a conversation when you have governments with different outlooks on environmental protection, for sure.”

In Canada, the Environmental Protection Act 1999 gets reviewed every five years on its ability to protect the environment. Under this act, the government is working on changing its Chemicals Management Plan, and Healthy Greats Lakes special projects counsel Anastasia Lintner from Canadian Environmental Law Association says this review is a good opportunity to reinforce the principle of prevention in environmental protection.

“[We can start by] changing the frame so that we’re looking at how one chemical we take out of use is substituted,” said Lintner. “So informed substitution so you don’t just introduce a new chemical that has similar properties, but doesn’t do one of the bad things we noticed, but [actually] ends up being worse for other reasons that we yet understand. Or even better, we reverse the onus: instead of scientists having to show that substances already in use are bad, what if we make sure that you have to prove it’s safe before you start to use it?”

Beyond the agreements

There are some transboundary problems that even the GLWQA and the IJC have yet to properly address.

Southern British Columbia coal mines have been a major source of selenium emissions that travel down the border into the Koocanusa reservoir located between British Columbia and Montana. Higher than normal amounts of selenium have resulted in the declining population of rare cutthroat trout, and can cause gastrointestinal disorders, nerve damage, cirrhosis of the liver and even death in humans. 

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, this dispute has been brewing for decades, with recent escalations involving the EPA demanding data from Canada to explain why Teck Resources coal mines are allowed to exceed restrictions on emitting the chemical, after Canadian IJC commissioners have refused to submit a report that addresses the pollution. 

Cobham says the cooperation of British Columbia, the United States and Canada is needed to come to a solution. 

“The magnitude of this is going to be something where we need to apply the tools that we have via regulations and monitoring and surveillance and setting targets around appropriate values that might be in the watershed, but over a very long period of time,” said Cobham. “Because there is just no lever we can pull to stall, it will be a matter of finding some kind of sustainable solution to it where we can reduce the amount of contaminants crossing, but we’ve [made] some significant way on to that.”

By Vanessa Balintec  

The United States and Canada have a long history of working together when it comes to tackling shared environmental concerns. But with bigger issues such as climate change on the horizon, what does the future hold when it comes to the two countries working together to address it?

According to Toronto-based York University environmental studies professor Mark Winfield, building upon existing agreements is key to making sure new problems are being dealt with, but the lack of political will on both sides hinders collective action. 

“They’re effective, and they do set minimum standards both parties need to meet, so we can’t really go backwards into it,” says Winfield. “But we’ve not really moved forwards very effectively, and that remains the big problem.”

Policy greatly influences environmental laws and regulation

Throughout his first three years of presidency, the Trump administration had reversed dozens of environmental laws that regulate air and water quality, weakened greenhouse gas emissions, cut back protected areas, and limited wildlife protections. Many of these reversals have been fought in court by state attorneys, but according to The State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, implementation of these some of these new laws is projected to lead to thousands of premature deaths each year due to poor air quality. 

Meanwhile, Canada has long since been dealing with environmental rollbacks that originate as far back as 2012. As part of Progressive Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper’s administration, laws were changed that made it harder for public consultation to take place during environmental reviews, and regulate fisheries, lakes and rivers, while more power was given to stakeholders and companies to circumvent reviews and strict regulation.

Does tackling environmental problems mean more cross-border agreements?

Although collaboration between countries is important, experts say that agreements between countries alone aren’t going to be what incites change. Cross-border collaborations may be of lower importance as time goes on, instead prioritizing domestic policy and enforcement.

“We have this kind of globalist narrative that says we have to collaborate and problems are global, and only by working together can we solve them,” says Mathis Wagernagel, founder and president of Global Footprint Network. “But what that really means is that people think [they] can’t do anything about it, so globalizing problems actually makes it ineffective.”

Air pollution can easily cross any boundary, but the United States and Canada address this through an agreement between the countries and each country’s own regulations.

by Lily Burris

What is air pollution?

Air pollution is, simply, things that are in the air that aren’t wanted, says Sebastian Eastham, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Usually, we’ll refer to things like air quality cause it kind of points out more of a metric that you can talk about and how air quality has been degraded by anthropogenic or human activity,” Eastham says.

Air quality is measured with a variety of tools to determine how many harmful pollutants can be found in a given sample, putting focus on how human emissions cause air pollution.

Eastham says who is downwind of whom, what the temperature is, the amount of precipitation an area has and what is being put into the air can affect what exactly the air pollution is in an area.

How is it managed between the two countries?

The United States and Canada signed the Air Quality Agreement in 1991, addressing acid rain related pollution, and it was expanded in 2000 to address ozone emissions and smog issues. Ambient air quality standards in both nations set the acceptable or manageable amount of prominent pollutants allowed in the air.

The National Ambient Air Quality Standards in the United States monitor carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particle pollution and sulfur dioxide.  The Canadian Ambient Air Quality Standards monitor fine particulate matter, ozone, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. 

Concerns are raised on both sides of the border on whether these agreements are enough to provide clean air for citizens. Figures show air pollution emissions are decreasing, but people are still at risk. In the United States alone, about 45% of the population live in an area with unhealthy ozone or particle pollution levels.

What is the impact of air pollution?

Air quality is of significant concern to countries, as poor air quality can lead to health implications and premature death. 

“The really simple explanation is that particulate matter in particular, if it’s large and has a diameter of more than 2.5 microns, it’s less likely to harm you, it can’t penetrate deep into the lungs,” says Eastham. “Particulate matter that has less than 2.5 microns diameter is more likely to penetrate deep into the lungs, and we correlate that successfully with greater mortality outcomes, and this is one of the things that’s been done over and over again.”

Many studies show a correlation between poor air quality and premature death, specifically relating to particulate matter and premature death.

“All around the mortality rate has increased by tens or hundreds of thousands a year every year because of pollution,” says Eastham. “So at some level, it’s best to sort of take a broad look and say anything we can do to bring that down is good.”