How do you protect the health and safety of those at the site and those who live in the area?

At IISD Experimental Lakes Area, the health and safety of our staff and local community are our first priority.

First, all our staff and students hold a variety of certifications (first aid, WHMIS, Transportation of Dangerous Goods, ATV, UTV, and snowmobile operation, chainsaw operation) and receive extensive safety-related training on site related to the various hazards they may encounter (including things like weather, safe lifting/carrying, wildlife/microbes, working in/on/around water, etc.).   We aim to foster a culture of safety on site, and take all safety concerns seriously, large and small.  Each new project comes with its own safety considerations, so we regularly add to our suite of safety protocols and equipment.

When designing and approving experiments that are to be conducted in one of the 58 lakes—which were initially selected for their remoteness and distance from human activity—we require the manipulation and its effects to be contained within the lakes themselves, and carefully monitor water downstream to ensure that the containment is successful.

Moreover, each manipulation must be ‘environmentally relevant’. That is to say, the amounts of a chemical introduced into the lake must reflect the average levels of contamination we are already seeing around the world, in order to produce scientifically useful results, but also to avoid risks to the health and safety of people on and around the lakes. In short, visiting or living close to an IISD-ELA lake is just like visiting or living close to any other lake in the world.

Finally, each research project must remediate the lake(s) in question after the research has wrapped up, thus returning them back to their original state.