Wetland Foundation Calls for Coastal Restoration Funding

In a presentation to the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Protection, Restoration and Conservation, America’s WETLAND Foundation (AWF) outlined innovative solutions to help expand and expedite coastal restoration efforts, in concert with Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan.

The foundation’s Adaptation for Gulf Coast Resiliency and Sustainability Program calls for stimulating more private sector cooperation, investment and participation in restoring coastal wetlands through greater incentives for land building, bio-mass development, scaled mitigation and voluntary environmental exchanges, along with the beneficial use of dredged materials linked to wetland carbon sequestration.

This effort will include demonstration projects and program recommendations to encourage innovation, enlist best practices, streamline governmental policies, address insurability issues and create new funding mechanisms that engage the private sector and the public in adaptation measures for a more resilient Gulf and national coast.

Recent polling in Louisiana and Texas conducted by AWF shows a vast majority of voters agree it will take the cooperation of all sectors to fight the most significant challenges of coastal land loss—financing restoration, building with nature, protecting the Mississippi River Delta, developing ecologically sound energy and fostering community resiliency. Seventy-four percent of voters in Louisiana say coastal restoration is the issue of their lifetime and 94% want the energy sector to work in concert with state and local governments on coastal restoration solutions.

The America’s WETLAND Foundation began its “Game On!” campaign in January with a series of ads throughout Louisiana showcasing public/private coastal restoration partnerships and utilizing the now popular phrase coined by AWF, “the equivalent of a football field of land lost each hour” to dramatize the urgency for action.

AWF is collaborating with a number of coastal partners across America, including the National Institute for Coastal and Harbor Infrastructure and the Union of Concerned Scientists, to build a coalition of diverse interests to help develop a comprehensive, national approach to coastal resiliency and sustainability. Most recently, AWF presented findings from a joint study with Entergy on resiliency and adaptation to a Wall Street summit that suggests state treasuries in the Gulf Coast will be hard pressed to keep up with infrastructure loss due to sea level rise and more severe, longer lasting, wider footprint storm events like Sandy and Isaac that key scientific reports predict will occur in the next 20 years.

The foundation is proposing that the new private focused sustainability program develops with initial demonstrations leading to scaled up restoration activities in both Louisiana and Texas.

Source: America's WETLAND Foundation