Capacity-building for restoring degraded areas in the Great Lakes

The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development identified capacity-building in Agenda 21 as one of the essential means to implement sustainable development. Capacity-building means an enhanced ability of a country or local region to identify and reach agreement on problems, develop policies and programmes to address them, and mobilize appropriate resources to fulfill the policies and programmes. One practical example of capacity-building in developed countries is the development and implementation of comprehensive remedial action plans (RAPS) to restore beneficial uses in 43 degraded areas of the Great Lakes, USA. RAPS employ a combination of: human elements and strategies (e.g. empowerment, long-term vision/mission driven, shared decision-making); tools and techniques (e.g. pollution prevention, habitat rehabilitation, remediation of contaminated sediments and hazardous waste sites); and management support systems (e.g. ecosystem performance measures, geographical information systems, information sharing) to build, organize and sustain capacities for the changes and transformations required to solve society's environmental problems. Taken together, these RAP elements contribute to the development of the human, scientific, technological, organizational, institutional and resource capabilities necessary to respond to the long-term challenge of ecosystem restoration in degraded areas of the Great Lakes, consistent with Agetida 21.