GEI’s Cameron Davis to Keynote “The Great Lakes in a Time of Hyper-Change”

GEI Vice President Cameron Davis will keynote before some 700 attendees of the International Association for Great Lakes Research 60th annual Conference on Great Lakes Research (IAGLR). The conference will take place in Detroit, Michigan from May 15-19, and will consist of four days of scientific sessions and speakers focusing on the theme From Cities to Farms: Shaping Great Lakes Ecosystems.

The Great Lakes—housing some 20% of the Earth’s and 95% of the nation’s fresh surface water—has seen negative disruption over more than a century from toxic contamination in “Areas of Concern,” habitat loss, invasive species and others threats. A proposed White House budget in March eliminated a funding for Great Lakes, going from $300 million to zero. Though Congress in late April restored the FY17 budget, the effort resulted in requests for assistance from GEI clients to assist with budget and natural resource advice. Davis’s keynote address will shine a light on these dynamics and efforts needed in the private and public sectors to continue to invest in science as a basis for corporate, government and other sectors’ decision making.

GEI’s Kelly Rice and Ryan Holem will present at IAGLR on the Muskegon Lake Area of Concern and Saginaw Bay walleye regulations, respectively. More info is online at http://iaglr.org/iaglr2017/.

Cameron Davis has more than 30 years’ experience in integrating policy, law, science, and economics. He coordinated the work of 11 federal departments, including the Department of the Interior, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Commerce, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, among others. His work included federal policy and funding coordination valued at more than $2 billion under the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which has been widely recognized as a successful results-oriented program with strong bipartisan support. In addition, Cam collaborated with state resource agencies, municipalities, tribes, academia, business and civic stakeholders to clean up toxic hotspot Areas of Concern, preventing the migration of invasive species to the Great Lakes and reducing runoff to improve water quality. He was also a lead negotiator on the U.S. negotiating team along with the U.S. Department of State that led to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 2012, the first time in a quarter-century that the internationally-recognized pact had been revitalized. Cam earned his law degree, including certification in environmental and energy law, from the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law and a B.A. from Boston University in International Relations.