SEAS Professor Mike Shriberg and recent graduates Kelsey Campana, Paige Lund, Lillian Wege and Emma Welsh developed a comprehensive report outlining legislation for groundwater protection

Michigan may be surrounded by the Great Lakes, but there is a source of freshwater lying underneath that is just as, if not more, vital to the health and well-being of the state’s residents, economy and natural habitats. Groundwater is one of the primary sources of drinking water, agricultural irrigation and ecosystem services—and there is no unified state policy framework for its regulation.

One University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) capstone team, led by Mike Shriberg (MS ’00, PhD ’02), SEAS professor of practice and engagement and director of the U-M Water Center, in partnership with Flow Water Advocates, is trying to change that. The project, titled “A Groundwater Strategy for Michigan: Protecting the ‘Sixth Great Lake’” and comprised of recent SEAS graduates Kelsey Campana (MS ’26), Paige Lund (MS ’26), Lillian Wege (MS/MURP ’26) and Emma Welsh (MS/MSE ’26), outlines the urgent need for statewide groundwater protection legislation and proposes specific policies. The policies would be a crucial step in modernizing Michigan’s environmental regulations and planning for a future in which groundwater regulation is even more urgently necessary.

Currently, groundwater regulation in Michigan lacks a structure and centralized framework, instead operating through a patchwork of state- and local-level policies with varying degrees of effectiveness. Working with the nonprofit client Flow Water Advocates, the capstone team analyzed case studies of groundwater contamination and management frameworks from other states, conducted interviews with participants in groundwater management, and developed strategies to bridge communication gaps between state and local agencies. 

“We were very generously welcomed into the groundwater research space by experts who had been there for decades, and were inspired by their dedication to basic, crucial and yet unsatisfied recommendations, like passing a statewide septic code and fully mapping Michigan’s groundwater resources,” said Wege. “From this multifaceted research came multifaceted recommendations that aim at various levels of participation, multiple levers of change and across scales of time.”

The capstone team utilized data on wells, water use and contamination sites to inform policy recommendations and map groundwater use by sector, leaking underground storage tank sites, and PFAS sites and areas of interest, further identifying opportunities to improve Michigan’s groundwater regulation. “Writing this section required reviewing the available groundwater data in Michigan and highlighted the gaps that still exist in aquifer mapping, groundwater monitoring and the systems used to organize and access these data,” said Welsh about the data-collecting process.

Using this information, the report proposed a new policy for standardizing Michigan’s groundwater regulation. “It’s bold, groundbreaking work, ” said Shriberg. “Nobody had shown what an actual protective groundwater policy would look like for the state.”

“They’re ideas that have a chance,” added Dave Dempsey, senior advisor at Flow Water Advocates. “Ideas I could actually see legislators being willing to sponsor. That was a really great result of the project.”

Shriberg notes that the team’s work has already caught the attention of the state legislature, which he hopes will introduce parts of the proposal into future bills. “Every politician in Michigan wants to be on the side of protecting the Great Lakes,” he said. “We have a unique opportunity here, because if groundwater is seen as core to Great Lakes protection, that’s where you can garner interest and funding, and that’s where the legislature has begun to invest.”

Dempsey pointed out plans to advocate for the project’s policy recommendations within future statehouse meetings. “We’re going to be shopping some of these concepts around to the next legislative members, to try to turn this into a lasting effect that we can point to in 10 years,” he said.

The capstone proposes a Groundwater Coordinating Council that would operate under the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy’s existing Water Use Advisory Council to coordinate and communicate information among state regulators, impacted communities, scientists and other stakeholders to foster collaboration. “That’s one of the recommendations that received the most early interest from the state legislature,” Shriberg noted. “When you have an issue that’s as big as groundwater, you need to actually connect all these folks. All of the leading states that we researched have some kind of coordinating body like that. We’re lacking that right now in Michigan.”

The ultimate goal of this initiative is to raise awareness of groundwater as an urgent water protection issue deserving of the same attention as more mainstream water protection issues. Bringing together expertise from state agencies, local governments, advocacy organizations and communities can help both legislators and the general public view groundwater as a central topic rather than a niche specialization.