Standing Ground Against Advancing Waters
Acre by Acre, CWPPRA Projects Beat Back Coastal Demise

What if, in the 1930s, a thief had begun to steal Delaware? What if, acre by acre, year after year, the thief stashed the land of Delaware out of sight and out of reach until the entire state was gone? And what if, still avaricious, the thief next purloined the island of Manhattan and the city of Washington, D.C. and started to stake out Miami and Des Moines and Carson City?

Louisiana has suffered such a thievery of land. During the past century water swept away 1,900 square miles of the state’s coastal zone, an area approximately the size of Delaware. And millennium predictions of losing another 500 square miles — more area than Manhattan and these other cities combined — over the next 50 years did not foresee hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroying more than 200 square miles of marsh in a single season.

CWPPRA

Louisiana is blessed with an abundance of natural resources. Approximately 40 percent of the coastal wetlands of the lower 48 states is located in Louisiana.

This fragile environment is disappearing at an alarming rate. Louisiana has lost up to 40 square miles of marsh a year for several decades - that's 80 percent of the nation's annual coastal wetland loss. If the current rate of loss is not slowed, by the year 2040 an additional 800,000 acres of wetlands will disappear, and the Louisiana shoreline will advance inland as much as 33 miles in some areas.

This prompted Congress to pass the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) in 1990. It funds wetland enhancement projects nationwide, designating approximately $60 million annually for work in Louisiana.

Project List

The CWPPRA Task Force annually develops a list of high-priority projects to be constructed. To date, seventeen such priority lists have been formulated. The projects funded by CWPPRA all focus on marsh creation, restoration, protection or enhancement.

PPL Reports

Site

The Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task Force Web site contains information and links relating to coastal restoration projects in coastal Louisiana.