With everyone paying due attention to the oil spill (now 80 miles and growing) on the river, a key story from yesterday's Times-Picayune got lost in the noise.
For years, writers, geologists, climate scientists and pols have discussed the value of coastal wetlands in flood protection. I recently reiterated that a smart presidential candidate could even reverse my state's reddening trend with a commitment to restoring Louisiana's coast.
But, throughout all the discussions, no one has ever specified just how much flood protection bang wetlands offer for the preservation/restoration buck. Now someone has.
A new study published in AMBIO, a peer-reviewed "Journal of the Human Environment" under the auspices of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, has put a monetary value on wetlands.
Coastal wetlands are self-maintaining "horizontal levees" that provide $23.2 billion worth of protection from hurricane-related flooding in the United States each year, according to a new study.
But Louisiana has lost $29.4 billion in flood protection benefits from the disappearance of 1,927 square miles of coastal wetlands during the past century, including the loss of $1.1 billion in benefits resulting from the erosion of 77 square miles of wetlands during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the study found.
The T-P article provides figures from the study regarding the value of wetlands in Louisiana. It's fairly short and non-technical. Worth the reading for anyone interested in the issues of flood control and coastal erosion. (Hint: anyone who eats, drives, wears shoes, uses steel products. . .)
This data is invaluable for decision makers in the Army Corps of Engineers as they allocate funds for flood protection. Just by itself, the proposed Morganza-to-the-Gulf manmade levee could top $10 billion to construct.
Meanwhile, a plan devised years ago, which would utilize the river's own resource to rebuild the wetlands of lower Terrebone and LaFourch Parishes, continues to languish unfunded.
The cost of implementing the original Breaux/Coast 2050 plan, the centerpiece of which entails diverting one-third of the Mississippi's flow at Donaldsonville and sending the levee-imprisoned silt into the marshes off Terrebone and Lafourche Parishes, has gone up since it was first proposed in 1999. Originally estimated at $14-15 billion, the plan gets more expensive every year we wait. Implementing Coast 2050 today would probably cost upwards of $20 billion.
Despite what the borrow-and-spend Republicans may believe, we are not a country of unlimited resources. Therefore it behooves us to budget our dollars carefully. This study provides a means of comparing, dollar for dollar, the effectiveness of manmade levees and natural wetlands in protecting against what will surely be more frequent and devastating floods.
Weighed against the staggering costs of protecting or relocating the country's key energy hub and it's most valuable port, wetlands restoration is a good investment.
Thanks to the authors of the AMBIO study for showing us how good.