Peter Annin, managing director of the University of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative (ND-ECI), will provide a briefing on the Great Lakes Compact to Congressional staff members in Washington, D.C., on Friday (Dec. 5).

The briefing was organized by the nonprofit, bipartisan Northeast-Midwest Institute. Honorary sponsors of the briefing are Senate Great Lakes Task Force co-chairs Sens. Carl Levin and Mark Kirk, Senate vice-chairs Debbie Stabenow and Rob Portman, and House Great Lakes Task Force Chairs Candice Miller, John Dingell, Sean Duffy and Louise Slaughter.

David Naftzger, executive director of the Council of Great Lakes Governors, also will participate in the briefing.

The Great Lakes Compact is a legal document designed to prevent the large-scale, long-range diversions of water from the Great Lakes Basin. Passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush in 2008, the Compact operates as a legal fence designed to keep Great Lakes water inside the Great Lakes Basin.

“In an era of increasing international water insecurity, the Great Lakes Compact is more important than ever,” Annin said. “Next year the Compact will be tested by a controversial water diversion proposal in suburban Milwaukee, and that is really what has triggered this briefing.”

Annin is an expert on the Great Lakes water diversion controversy. His 2006 book, “The Great Lakes Water Wars,” is considered to be the definitive work on the subject.

The Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative (ND-ECI) is tackling the interrelated problems of invasive species, land use and climate change, focusing on their synergistic impacts on water resources. The goal of ND-ECI is to provide solutions that minimize the trade-offs between human welfare and environmental health where trade-offs are unavoidable, and to discover win-win solutions where they are possible.