EAST LANSING – The importance of improving the Great Lakes, cleaning its waters and beaches and ridding it of invasive species, is magnified by the recognition that the entire Great Lakes region is equal to the fourth-largest economy in the world.

At a forum on threats to the Great Lakes, sponsored by the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, Director Jon Allan of the state’s Office of the Great Lakes, said if the entire region were a nation, its economy would lie between Japan’s and Germany’s.

The current and potential economic power of the region makes it critical the lakes be restored to health, he said.

The region has “more economic capacity the healthier the lakes are,” he said.

The forum looked into a number of threats, including that of invasive species and lake levels.

Michael Jones, chair of the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University, said while efforts have controlled some invasive species fairly successfully, such as the lamprey eel, and other invasive species, such as the Eurasian ruffe, have had little effect on the lakes, others have had dramatic impact.

For example, zebra and quagga mussels appear to have destroyed virtually all of a species of tiny aquatic creatures critical as food for several species of fish, he said.

The great fear now is the potential for Asian carp getting into the Great Lakes, and because no one knows what they could do to the ecosystem, “we are sitting on a time bomb,” he said.

The danger posed by the Asian carp also shows how critical the connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin is, Jones said.

Allan said approval of Congress for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has put nearly $1 billion into use in projects all across the region to clean and restore the lakes, connecting wetlands and beaches.

In Michigan that has amounted to $200 million being spent on projects all across the state, he said.

And studies have indicated that spending as much as $25 billion on restoring the lakes could have a payoff of as much as $100 billion, he said.

The Great Lakes region being the fourth-largest economy reflects both the U.S. and Canadian sides of the lakes, Mr. Allan said, but just on the U.S. side 1.5 million jobs are supported and the region accounts for one-quarter of all U.S. exports.

Shipping on the Great Lakes is already a $34 billion industry, he said, and could be improved by further investment in its ports and harbors. In fact, Allan said, 50 percent of the port facilities in the Great Lakes were built by 1915 and building that industry will require modernization of those facilities.

And the Detroit-Warren-Livonia labor market, the state’s largest, saw its adjusted unemployment rate fall by 0.4 percentage points to 9.9 percent.

Even with the overall increase, the number of payroll jobs fell by 7,000 during the month, mostly because of drops in the construction and retail sectors, along with a drop in government employment.

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