America's Wetland Foundation

Lawmakers seek Obama's support on coast restoration bill

By: DEBORAH BARFIELD BERRY , Gannett Washington Bureau

Gulf Coast lawmakers hope President Barack Obama will use his address to the nation tonight to support a bill that would send most of the fines collected from the BP oil spill to the region for restoration efforts.

How the Mississippi River Delta links Midwestern farmers with mainland China

By: Seyi Fayanju, Enviromental Defense Fund

Gung Hay Fat Choy! As billions of people in China (and elsewhere) celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year, many will be sitting down to dinner tables stocked with wheat noodles, corn-fed beef, soy sauce, and other foods whose inputs were cultivated in the American heartland and subsequently shipped to East Asia by way of the Mississippi River Delta. In this post, we will look at U.S.-China agricultural trade through Louisiana’s ports, and discuss why wetland protection could be critical to safeguarding this commercial link between the world’s two largest economies.

Master plan for coastal restoration gives hope: Bob Marshall

By: Bob Marshall, Times-Picayune

We need to discuss two words today: Hope and courage. In almost 40 years of covering the state's coastal crisis, "hope" is a word I've seldom been able to write. There were decades when the state refused to even acknowledge we had problem. There were political leaders who refused to address the forces responsible. And there was a population that refused to get involved. So it was little wonder during that time the Gulf of Mexico moved within eye-shot of our major cities, or that the groundwork was laid for a disaster named Katrina.

Louisiana coastal restoration forecast: An editorial

By: Editorial Staff, Times-Picayune

Protecting and restoring Louisiana's coast is an urgent priority for this state, and the draft plan for fiscal year 2013 that was presented this week to the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority reflects the large scope of work. The $923 million plan puts together all restoration and levee projects that are financed by state and federal agencies, including money that the state must put up as matching funds. It includes storm protection projects and coastal restoration work.

Writing the Rule That Will Rebuild the Bayou – With Carbon

By: Ecosystem Marketplace

When Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge – the highest in recorded history at 27.8 feet – hit New Orleans’ St. Bernard Parish in August, 2005, the floodwaters breached levies and poured in first from the north and the east. And then from the west. Homes filled with water up to their 10 foot ceilings in fifteen minutes. In a few hours, the once bustling New Orleans suburb was wholly inundated.

Coastal plan worthy of support

By: Don Shoopman, The Daily Iberian

As always, the local angle is the preferred one for The Daily Iberian, especially when it deals with the valuable Louisiana coast line in the Teche Area.

Louisiana panel OKs $81.6 million for projects to restore wetlands

By: Mark Schleifstein, Times-Picayune

A federal-state task force on Thursday approved spending $81.6 million to build two medium-size projects that will restore key wetlands and ridges on the east and west banks of Plaquemines Parish, and to create an emergency fund to plant wetland grasses, shrubs and trees in rapidly eroding locations along Louisiana’s coast.

Wetlands could soon get carbon-credit money

By: Cara Bayles, Daily Comet

A proposal that would allow companies to invest in coastal wetland-restoration projects could bring $5 billion to $15 billion into Louisiana over the next 40 years.

Louisiana coastal restoration spending plan proposed

By: Mark Schleifstein, Times-Picayune

Louisiana would spend $923 million on hurricane protection and coastal restoration projects during fiscal year 2013, including $161 million to pay part of the state’s share of the upgraded New Orleans area hurricane levee system, and $23 million toward the Morganza to the Gulf levee protecting Houma, according to a draft plan presented to the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority on Wednesday.

Coastal plan spans decades

By: Mike Hasten, The News-Star

A proposed master plan for protecting and restoring Louisiana's coast won't make everybody happy, says Garret Graves, chairman of state panel charged with the task, but it's a plan that can protect the state from further ruin from storms.

American Carbon Registry Initiates Approval of World's First Carbon Offset Methodology for Deltaic Wetland Restoration

By: PR Newswire

American Carbon Registry (ACR), a nonprofit enterprise of Winrock International, announces an open public comment period for a first-of-its-kind carbon offset methodology that will both quantify how wetland restoration work can combat climate change and provide a way to help pay for rebuilding the Gulf of Mexico's disappearing coastal wetland. The methodology, Restoration of Degraded Deltaic Wetlands of the Mississippi Delta, was funded by Entergy Corporation and developed by Dr. Sarah K. Mack of New Orleans-based Tierra Resources LLC, with contributions from Dr. Robert R. Lane, Dr. John W. Day and Tiffany M. Potter.

Listen to Managing Director, Val Marmillion on WWL from January 16, 2012

By: WWL Radio

Wetland Watchers Park adds outdoor learning area

By: Jennifer Boquet, The Times-Picayune

If not for the rusted truck bed sitting off to the side of a new wooden walkway at Wetland Watchers Park in Norco, it might be hard to believe that the area where cypress trees grow and pelicans swoop overhead was once a highway. To travel this part of the Old Hammond Highway today would be impossible. The path would lead straight into Lake Pontchartrain.

Louisiana's updated coastal restoration plan is a map to the future: An editorial

By: Editorial Staff, The Times-Picayune

The state's updated plan for coastal restoration lays out two vastly different pictures of the future for Louisiana -- one dire, one hopeful. In the first, nothing is done to combat the complex forces that have already caused this state to lose 1,883 square miles of land since the 1930s.

What a dilemma

By: Keith Magill, Houmatoday

What impressed me most as I read the state's latest plan to save its coast is the map. A sea of red, representing an encroaching Gulf of Mexico, consumes almost every inch of every inhabited community south of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. And the parts that are left within 50 years look like they would flood so often it would make them impractical to inhabit.