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Metropolitan Sustainability
Martin Jaffe
Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program
mjaffe@uic.edu
Issues of sustainability cover a wide arena, including
clean air, accessible and clean water, the conservation of energy and
natural resources, habitat protection and the challenges to the physical
and cultural environment brought on by metropolitan growth. Great Cities
Institute Fellows and Scholars pursue projects that enhance knowledge
and shape environmental policy. Working with a variety of partners and
funding sources, the Institute provides opportunities to publish, disseminate
and share research results with the goal of bringing this knowledge
to bear on policy-making in urban settings across the country.
IISGCP Coastal
Business and Water for Our Future Initiatives
Southern
Lake Michigan Regional Water Supply Consortium
THE COASTAL CITIES and WATER FOR OUR FUTURE
INITIATIVES
Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program and
the Great Cities Institute
The Coastal Cities and Water for Our Future Initiatives of the Illinois-Indiana
Sea Grant College Program support and guide the Great Cities Institute’s
program in Metropolitan Sustainability. The Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant
College Program seeks to provide academic research and technical support
to local governments and planning agencies within northeastern Illinois
and northwestern Indiana. This engaged research includes the development
and application of practical, science-based decision-support tools to
promote a more sustainable future for the southern Lake Michigan region.
The growth of coastal cities like Chicago, and the ecological
problems linked to metropolitan expansion, is readily apparent and well
documented. However, the natural processes critical to sustaining urban
populations, economic activities, and highly-valued natural amenities
are often subtle and invisible to most people. There is a growing realization
that society must quickly find ways of integrating critical ecosystem
services into regional development plans and the management of urban
regions. However, science-based decision support structures and tools
that can help urban regions accomplish this are not fully developed.
This is especially the case for the hydrological resources
of metropolitan Chicago. Much of our region's existing water-related
infrastructure (shoreline protection works, water distribution systems,
and water reclamation plants) will need replacement or upgrading over
the next 50 years, and there are ever-increasing demands and stresses
on these coastal resources. Many of these stresses are indirect and
complex, involving the alteration of natural water flow patterns, nutrient
enrichment associated with human activities, accidental introductions
of nuisance species, and long- and short-term cycles in water levels
and temperature. The need to understand and incorporate such complex
relationships in regional planning and management is the goal for the
Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program’s Coastal Cities and
Water for Our Future Initiatives.
Vision:
The vision is to develop a portfolio of integrated land use, economic
and ecologic research and outreach activities to promote better regional
decision-making. These activities will provide guidance to achieving
economically and ecologically sustainable development within metropolitan
Chicago and which can, in turn, be used as a model for the nation.
Rationale:
Metropolitan Chicago and the Southern Lake Michigan region, an area
covering four states and currently home to over 11 million citizens,
continues to grow and will continue to rely heavily on the tremendous
diversity of resources that Lake Michigan provides. Almost 10 million
people rely on the Lake for drinking water and more than 6 million visitors
annually use coastal lake resources for recreation. Interspersed within
this metropolis are nationally and globally significant natural resources
and ecosystems that miraculously have survived the last 150 years of
urbanization. The southern Lake Michigan basin contains 40 percent of
the Great Lakes coastal wetlands, as well as large forested areas and
a number of wildlife refuges.
The growth of this region will inevitably impose more
land use change. Although the City of Chicago has a history of seeking
to preserve its important natural amenities and while regional planning
agencies and suburban communities are increasing their sensitivity to
the long-term environmental impacts imposed by growth, there is a striking
lack of science-based information to identify and quantify the long-term
economic and ecologic trade-offs being made. This lack of information
and regional guidance is one of the factors which contribute to local
development patterns that favor short-term economic gain.
There is a strong view that while the urbanization process
generates wealth for the region, the fundamental substitution of natural
capital for physical capital that occurs in land use change represents
an unsustainable pattern. The loss of open land and functioning ecosystems
is essentially an irreversible process, and little insight is available
to those making land-use change decisions as to what tangible and intangible
values are being lost. If society is committed to understanding what
sustainable development means in a practical sense, it must be willing
to preserve natural capital and conserve the region’s natural
and water resources. Natural capital is broadly defined as the totality
of natural systems that provide current and future flows of service,
i.e. resources, flora, fauna, and ecosystems that provide human beings
with tangible and intangible goods and services that have real use and
non-use economic value.
What is the stock of natural capital within and at the
fringe of metropolitan Chicago? What is the value of this stock and
how much of this value is lost when land use change is accomplished
in its current fragmented fashion? It is to these questions that we
seek to assemble a coherent, science-based response.
Methods:
The Great Cities Institute proposes a series of environmental research
projects to begin to define the relationship of the region’s natural
capital stock to the regional economy. These will provide insight and
scale to the tradeoffs being made as natural capital is lost in the
land use change process. Specifically, these projects are:
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Development of water supply planning and
management strategies to promote more sustainable regional development.
Existing land use plans fail to adequately reflect the interaction
between economic and environmental factors. We are working with
the Illinois Department of Natural Resource’s Office of Water
Resources, the State Water and Geological Surveys, and with the
Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning to develop better policies
for assessing and managing stressed or constrained surface and ground
water supply resources within the metropolitan Chicago region. The
water supply management research will be driven by an appreciation
of the increasingly polycentric patterns of metropolitan growth,
the variability in the quantity and quality of ground and surface
water resources within the region, the complex legal and institutional
mechanisms for managing water supply resources within the Great
Lakes basin, and the difficulty of understanding the pricing (and
economies of scale) of water withdrawal, treatment and distribution
within the larger Chicago metro area. Research on metropolitan-scale
water supply policy and economics will provide a means of comparing
and contrasting the environmental impacts of regional land use plans.
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Development of a spatial understanding
of non-market economic values of environmental resources.
An important starting point for a region’s search for economic
and ecologic sustainability is a thorough exploration of the non-market
economic value of the region’s natural capital stock –
value that reflects the use and non-use value of environmental amenities
and its capabilities to serve as “green infrastructure”
for the region. A strong case must be made that the region’s
biodiversity and its critical ecological assets must be protected
for the benefit of the region’s residents and their progeny,
even if no markets currently exist to price these environmental
amenities and natural resources. This research will identify the
economic use and non-use value of functioning ecosystem as well
as the economic benefits accruing from interventions aimed at restoring
urban ecosystems.
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Development of sustainable coastal management
policies. The Great Cities Institute is involved in several
technical assistance groups of the Illinois Department of Natural
Resources’ Coastal Management initiative, which is seeking
to develop criteria and policies in support of the state’s
application for participation in the federal Coastal Zone Management
Program. The policies may include managing and protecting coastal,
ravine, and near-shore habitats, assessing and mitigating the risks
arising from natural hazards (seiches, bluff erosion and flooding)
and anthropogenic sources (principally coastal development and invasive
species), and promoting accessible recreation and appropriate and
sustainable land uses within the state’s proposed coastal
zone.
Impacts:
The impact of this long-term research effort is to integrate sustainable
development theory within regional land use practice on a very large
scale. This effort will provide insight and guidance into how similar
efforts can be successfully conduced in other metropolitan areas throughout
the U.S. The development of the models suggested above will provide
information to support decisions to control land use change throughout
the region. This research will guide decisions that:
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Will provide more accurate information to support
regional Smart Growth initiatives, including promoting development
and redevelopment within central cities and close-in suburbs instead
of encouraging growth further out on the urban fringe.
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Provide science-based justification to limit the
expansion of the urbanized area to areas and parcels that sacrifice
the least amount of natural capital value.
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Promote urban development in ways that preserve
and enhance the quantity and quality of surface- and ground-water
resources throughout the region.
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Identify the optimum ways, both economically and
ecologically, that coastal resources can be utilized.
THE SOUTHERN LAKE MICHIGAN REGIONAL
WATER SUPPLY CONSORTIUM
This project is being conducted in partnership with the
Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the Southeast Wisconsin Regional
Planning Commission (SEWRPC) and the Northwest Indiana Regional Planning
Commission (NIRPC), U.S. and state geological (and water) surveys and
environmental protection agencies, local officials, and municipal, regional,
and state water supply managers within the tri-state Chicago metropolitan
area.
The metropolitan Chicago area encompasses southeastern
Wisconsin, northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana. This tri-state
region utilizes both Lake Michigan and groundwater to meet its current
water supply needs. Given the significant growth forecasts for the region,
considerable uncertainty exists as to how municipal and regional officials
will be able to supply the growing water demand over the next 20 years.
This is primarily due to the current legal limitation on expansion of
Lake Michigan withdrawals for the State of Illinois. Given this limitation
on lake water, it is most likely that future water supply will have
to come from the region’s existing groundwater and surface water
resources -- resources that are highly vulnerable to the inevitable
land use change that will accompany the tri-state region’s projected
economic expansion. Within Illinois, for example, cursory examination
of this situation by the Illinois State Water Survey identifies significant
spatial shortages in water supply and no formally articulated local
or regional strategies to prevent these shortages. Similar analyses
by the U.S. and Wisconsin Geological Surveys suggest similar water supply
issues are also confronting communities in southeastern Wisconsin.
In partnership with the Illinois State Water Survey
and the regional planning commissions in northeastern Illinois, southeastern
Wisconsin, and northwestern Indiana, the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant
College Program and UIC’s Great Cities Institute are developing
joint research projects for the southern Lake Michigan basin that will
include:
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Scientific hydrological research to better identify
and characterize the sustainable yields of deep and shallow aquifers
used by the Chicago metro area, the watersheds within the tri-state
region that can serve as drinking water resources, and the withdrawal
and ecological improvements of Lake Michigan that may be required
under emerging interstate agreements.
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Research on the governmental and institutional
arrangements needed to examine the current water resource supply
systems in place to meet existing demand and to articulate any existing
strategies and policy structures at the local and/or regional level
to meet anticipated water demand growth for multiple water uses.
This research, directed to local and regional officials and planners,
would include the identification of a) current spatial water resource
supply patterns; b) predicted/anticipated spatial water resource
supply options/plans; c) existing plans to coordinate economic growth
and land use change in terms of the provision of water supply and
physical infrastructure for storm management and sewage; and d)
current plans for cooperation with any neighboring municipality
or county to manage water resource demand and/or supply.
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Economic and institutional recommendations for managing
regional water supply resources. Based on the research, IISGCP and
GCI will work with water supply stakeholders to develop better strategies
to assess and manage water supply resources within the southern
Lake Michigan basin. These strategies could employ recommendations
for the creation of new types of water resource institutions, the
development of different types of regulatory or market-based proposals
to encourage more effective conservation, more efficient pricing,
and the wiser use of stressed or constrained water resources, and
the promotion of enhanced intergovernmental management cooperation
and analytical coordination for watersheds and groundwater aquifers
that cross state lines.
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