Louisiana is losing ground.

Land subsidence, sea level rise, erosion have claimed parts of the coast equal to the size of a small state.

But Louisiana is also gaining ground, building land through dredging silt from Louisiana rivers and pumping it on to a designated spot and also by river diversion, letting the Mississippi flow with its sediment payload reclaiming some of what's been lost.

Saving coastal Louisiana is a monumental task, but one that the state has undertaken to battle what is considered an existential threat to a valued way of life and an economic driver.

And with that battle come challenges and opportunities for the Louisiana coast.

Hello Im Marcia Kavanaugh and thanks for joining us for our first program and our series about the Louisiana coast.

So what's the plan?

How do we save coastal Louisiana?

The state has one and it's been updated.

And that is what we are going to discuss with our panel of environmental journalists.

Mark Schleifstein, environment reporter, The Times-Picayune, The New Orleans Advocate.

Halle Parker, Coastal Desk, environment reporter, WWNO and WRKF Public Radio in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

And coming to us from Italy, Bob Marshall, environmental columnist, The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans Advocate.

Thanks a lot for being here, guys.

And ciao Bob we're going to get to our discussion in just a minute.

But first, a little background on the state's plan to create a sustainable coast.

The 2023 Coastal Master Plan is the state's fourth edition of the ongoing effort to preserve South Louisiana.

More than 2000 square miles of the Louisiana coast have been lost since the 1930s.

Since the state created the first Coastal Master plan in 2007.

More than $21 billion has been spent to complete projects to benefit 87 square miles, improve levees and restore barrier islands.

But it's a constant battle and selecting projects for the 2023 plan.

Two main factors were considered land area that could be built and the reduction of flood risk.

The projects are described as structural, like dredging and marsh creation and river diversions to nonstructural, like fortifying homes and communities.

Decisions were based on scenarios of low and high environmental impact depending on the severity of factors like sea level rise and climate change.

But the prediction of the loss of 1100 square miles over 50 years in the lower risk scenario if no action is taken.

3000 square miles lost in the higher risk scenario.

However, the plan asserts with implementation of the plan projects, land will be gained and flood risk lessened, while also recognizing that nothing is certain and change is inevitable.

And there's also the matter of funding $50 billion over the next 50 years and having enough sediment to do the job.

Still, the plan concludes action must be taken.

Doing nothing is simply not an option.

And so what's this plan?

Now we are updating the plans every six years.

So 2023.

You know, it first started in 2007.

How are these plans sort of evolved over the years?

Well, at the very beginning, the the plan was actually developed to sort of short circuit with the Army Corps of Engineers was doing.

That's something that a lot of people don't understand.

The state actually adopted the first plan in response to the course development of a similar sort of plan based on corps views and wanted to include it in the Corps plan as it was being given to Congress.

But the Corps plan took so long that the state just went ahead and developed their own plan.

And started operating it, putting out the money and starting to do it.

The the Corps plan ended up being adopted by Congress a couple of years later.

But the bottom line of the Corps plan was, well, the states already got this plan, so we're going to let them go ahead and follow that.

We'll have some projects that will be coordinated with them to do that.

And then every five years after that, until 2017, when they expanded it to six years, there's been an update of the plan based on lessons learned in development of projects during the earlier plans.

A new science that's come out and a variety of other issues, especially funding where the state could get money in 2010 was one of the key issues for that.

That was the year of the BP oil spill.

And the state has gotten billions of dollars as a result of that, that it's able to move forward with and help develop a lot of the restoration projects.

And then there have been a lot of restoration projects over these years that have restored levees and repaired barrier islands.

Also built some land.

Exactly.

Exactly.

The projects have largely been what the state's been looking at are key types of projects.

One is barrier islands, rebuilding the entire layer of barrier islands on our coast, which is largely complete, and then trying to fill open water areas that had eroded away with sediment that's been pulled out of the Mississippi River and other locations and pipeline to those locations.

And now the state is focusing on diversions where they will put sediment into these large diversions to to both fill new open water areas, but also to keep those other areas that were already built above sea level, over sea level rises.

And so, Halle, let's talk about this current plan now to 2023 and looking at the low risk, high risk scenarios, depending upon what happens with climate change and sea level rise.

And it let's just take a quick look at a couple of maps.

Also, we saw in the opening piece about land lost.

This is flood risk.

This is the low risk.

And also the plan says future without action or future with action.

This is a future without action, low risk.

You can see what the inundation would be like off the Louisiana coast as it's projected over the next 50 years.

Let's go to the other slide.

And this is the future of the future with under high, with the future without action under high risk.

And you'll see it's a lot darker along the coast.

That means the inundation levels would also would also be higher.

So with this research that has been put into this plan with these predictions, at any rate, what does the state predict will happen if the projects that they have selected so far in the 2023 plan indeed do happen?

What will benefit the state?

Yeah, well, if there is that lower risk scenario, which would be about a foot and a half of sea level rise, the state's hoping to be able to sustain, you know, over 300 square miles of land that would have otherwise had been lost and really avoid I think it's in the millions or billions dollars of infrastructure damage.

$11 billion a year at the end of 50 years.

So that's a significant amount of money.

It definitely is.

And so that's obviously a big consideration of the plan, too, is the economic impact.

If we don't do anything in this plan.

There was certainly something that wasn't in the other way.

A couple of things less diversions in this current plan.

And then also just specifically the town of Jean Lafitte, a little bit different.

Sure.

So so the the diversion issue is this.

The state has focused a lot of efforts on one major diversion that it's actually two on the east and west banks of the Mississippi River.

And in Plaquemines Parish.

Thank you.

And as as things have moved on, they've decided that because of the fresh water that will be added, because there's two major diversions.

They're trying to reconsider how how big additional diversion should be if they decide to do them.

There's one that's proposed at AMA, which is just west of the Davis pond freshwater diversion.

That would be a sediment diversion.

And there are a couple of others that a little bit further up the river.

And then there are freshwater diversions on the on the other side of the river, on the east bank and freshening wetland areas.

And then, of course, mid Barataria is has this happening Right.

So mid Barataria is the key one that the state has been focusing a lot of their efforts on.

It has the permits in place from the federal government to build it and construction is supposed to officially kick off on August 11th.

But in the previous plans there was more focus on diversions.

There's a little bit less.

Right.

There were additional diversions.

And what the what the state is waiting for, in part is a study that the Army Corps of Engineers just began this month that will look at how to use the sediment in the Mississippi River to the best benefit for a variety of different reasons, but largely to rebuild land.

And until that information is available, it's sort of holding its breath on where what what additional diversions might be added.

The other issue there is, of course, that additional diversions mean more freshwater into especially Barataria Bay and more problems for existing fishers and also for dolphins or dolphins, as there definitely has been the controversy over mid Barataria.

Nonstructural and nonstructural is in the plan has been the previous plans to structural is these types of projects, land building projects, dredge dredging, the sediment pumping it, etc.. Nonstructural is a different issue and there is money in this plan for nonstructural.

What is the state plan to do?

What does it say it will do regarding this nonstructural and explain what is nonstructural?

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say there's money in the plan for nonstructural issues, things like elevating people's houses, ways to adapt to how the coast is changing.

But there has been a very large study done on the part of the state, and I believe the Army Corps of Engineers, the South Central Coast study is what I'm referring to.

There are two that have already been done south, southwest and South Central.

Both of them are proposing to do nonstructural instead of building levees to improve the opportunity to to not be flooded.

And what nonstructural means, it's the Army Corps of Engineers word or those horrible words that they come up with that nobody understands what they mean.

What it means is elevating homes, flood proofing businesses that are are to it to a lower amount.

And then either buying people out or just removing buildings from the floodplain.

And so those projects, the the plan has $11 billion over the next 50 years set aside for that, but has no money identified for those plans other than if the Corps of Engineers decides that nonstructural will be done instead of instead of building levees.

Right.

And they've also not determined where those projects would happen there.

They say in the plan that they're leaning on more like local authorities to be able to start that planning process.

And so in for the town of Jean, the feat in the plan now is the levees are adding to the levees that already exist as opposed to a nonstructural approach.

Right.

So for For Jean Lafitte the 2017 plan called for building a levee to about seven and a half feet, which would basically take care of of flooding that's caused by high tides, which is not enough for what the community wanted.

But it's a small community.

So it's very expensive to build a higher levee.

The state's gone ahead and said we're going to build a higher levee to about 15 feet.

That will provide protection from a 1% event, a an alleged hundred year storm, the same kind of protection that the West Bank and East Bank levee systems for the New Orleans area have.

So it's a very expensive project, Billion dollars or more.

And this is something that the residents there have been asking for for a really long time.

So, yeah, this is something that they definitely have wanted.

So when you're reading this plan, this coastal master plan, one thing that's repeated and often is that there's a lot of uncertainty here.

The thing that is for sure is that the Louisiana coast will be changing over these next 50 years.

So this plan is trying to preempt some things and trying to restore and preserve our coastline.

But you guys have talked about funding.

That is a real big issue.

Bob, lets bring you on in here because this is a you know, it's a plan with great ambitions, you know, and it's actually trying to rebuild.

The whole Delta is extremely ambitious and it just seems like it's such a monumental task.

Can it be done?

But certainly it can't be done if there's no money there.

So that's what you wanted to talk about was, you know, the challenges that we have to face in meeting these challenges of an eroding coast and actually doing this plan.

Well, you know, the state really is in a race right now that it's losing basically what isn't mentioned much in the plan.

When they talk about high and low scenarios, all that is tied to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are produced by the world, that the low scenarios are all based on, somehow the world reducing dramatically reducing emissions by 50% over the next ten years, 7 to 10 years.

The scenario is if the world doesn't do that and right now the world is far behind that goal.

So most of the the high scenario is much more likely if those emissions are not reduce.

So right now we're running a race on that and that one category that we're losing and the other one is money.

And if we CPRA said this year that they're basically facing a cliff, a fiscal cliff, I believe in about 7 to 8 years because that's when the BP money runs out.

If we don't have a permanent funding source by then, well, you'd have to start cutting back on a lot of things which means you can protect fewer areas and rebuild more land because sea level rise would just become basically overwhelming.

Up till now, most of the land that we've lost has been a result of some of the world's greatest coastal subsidence.

You know, some areas have been sinking at the rate of an inch every 30 months for decades.

It's 18 inches in 50 years, 3 ft in a century.

But sea level rise is accelerating at such a rate that most of the models with high confidence show that we're looking at a 2 to 2 and a half feet by 2050 in this area, just from sea level rise.

And if you add in the fact that we're seeing at the same time, it's really a scary threshold.

So we have these these two we can't have just one.

In other words, if we get the money.

But sea level rise continues to accelerate beyond 2040 and 2050, at the rate it's accelerating right now, it really won't matter much will slow way back.

And if we if we were to reduce emissions and the world reduces emissions and we get the money, it may be too late.

So all this really depends.

Our best hopes are if the rest of the world this is no longer just a Louisiana battle.

We need help from the world.

Any any input on that?

Yeah.

So the state is looking for additional sources of money it has.

And that also is going to be problematical in a world where you're seeing reduced emissions because the reduction of those emissions will be the result of a reduction of of use of oil and gas.

Well, oil and gas will continue to be a key player in terms of the the amount of money that the state wants to get from for for its restoration and levee program.

At the moment, it gets a share of 37% or a little bit more of offshore oil money goes to the state and that money is used for levees.

It wants to expand that to get a similar sort of share from offshore wind and other uses offshore that might pop up solar or something else.

We'll see if that happens.

It has to Congress has to approve that it failed to do so last year.

So that's one key issue, one key area.

The the other problem the state has is is just looking at the BP oil spill, money disappearing in 2032 and finding other ways of doing it.

It has the ability of getting money from other oil spills that will be occurring and already have occurred.

There's like 500 oil spills from Katrina that there still has not been a natural resource damage assessment written for.

That could add to money.

And then there are the lawsuits that the state that parishes have filed against oil and gas companies to restore wetlands.

And that money could also be used.

Okay.

So money and the continuing source of money is certainly a big issue.

Also, sediment states that in the plan, too, we need that sediment.

That's also true.

And that is one of the things that will be the the focus of that new Army Corps of Engineers study is exactly how much sediment is coming in.

The latest study that we've seen, that we've reported on shows that while there has been a continuing loss of sediment in the river because of modern ways of reducing runoff from up upriver, there's enough sentiment in the river that can be pumped out to to deal with the losses that we're dealing with.

But it's making sure that that material gets out of the river and into open water areas, causing the least amount of damage to existing resources.

Okay.

And Bob, and political will to put the money, continue to put the money in this to get this done.

You know, the state plan basically says we need to we need a future with action.

A future without action is really dire.

So political will there across the board to do that, do you think?

Well, I mean, there's two political wills in talking about the state of Louisiana, which I think are any state representative in Baton Rouge.

They'll say, yes, we want to get this done.

Then you'd have to go to Congress.

And frankly, we had a window of 30 years where we were the only state looking for that type of funding for that project.

But unfortunately, with sea level rise accelerating the rest of the coastal states, most of them much larger than us, but much larger congressional delegations are now designing their own projects.

And so, you know, Garret Graves, when he was a congressman and when he was head of the CPRA, right.

He had once had a talk with said that the one good thing about Obama being elected is that Democrats will spend more money.

So while I'm a Republican in this case, it's good that we have a Democrat.

So a lot will depend on which party is in Congress.

Democrats will spend more money.

And the other thing is, you know how much weight we can throw as far as getting this money?

I think that the best argument we have is basically the port and the energy infrastructure here.

I don't know if the rest of the country will care much about our culture or anything else when they're fighting, as Florida will as Texas already is as New York, Maine.

I mean, you just go down the list, are all now aware of what's happening and they need money and they want federal money.

Yeah.

So we'll have growing competition, too.

So are we still at the losing a football field for what was it, every hour or.

Yeah, it's it's every hundred minutes at the moment and and we're really not sure where we are right now there.

The US Geological Survey did the survey did the, the research that ended up with that number a couple of years ago it was supposed to have done and updated that study about three years ago.

And it keeps being messed up.

Not able to finish it because of new hurricanes that have hit the coast, which means they have to go back out and survey to see how much land loss was the result of those hurricanes.

So that's that's still a problem.

Let me just point out one of the thing that Bob was talking about, money we need you need to understand what Congress is dealing with before Katrina.

The Corps of Engineers budget for projects like that were maybe four or five billion a year at most.

Katrina was 14 and a half billion dollars.

The seawall proposed for Houston is $39 billion.

There's a similar plan for for Florida that's also in the tens of billions of dollars.

And New York City is now looking at a plan for 70 to $80 billion to reduce its risk from hurricane flooding.

All right.

Big, big, big challenges ahead.

So, Halle, I'm going to start with you and each of you about a minute or so to give me your thoughts on this.

What is this plan telling us?

I mean, like I said, there is the word uncertainty a lot.

So what is this telling us?

How should Louisianians prepare for it?

And particularly through your prism as the younger generation, you're going to be facing this in years to come?

Yeah, that's a really great question.

I mean, it's so challenging just because this is on a scale that is so difficult for us to understand as individuals.

I mean, I just bought a house in New Orleans and I'm not sure what this means for me having this kind of uncertain future about, you know, should I elevate my home, should I look to move even farther inland?

We are seeing people start to adjust a little bit in the latest census, but people are moving from some of the riskiest places on the coastline up a little bit farther into south Louisiana.

But it's still the population centers are in the lower third.

So and eventually we're also going to potentially have to leave those areas, even if we are just trying to sustain like a smaller coast.

And that's a really difficult conversation to have.

Bob, let's go to you.

Take away from this plan.

What would you say?

Well, I'm always amazed at the great science and engineering behind it.

But I have to say that I think the plan I don't think it mentioned greenhouse gas emissions maybe once, but I think it's certainly in the appendices of the science.

And we talk I think it's giving, unfortunately, a sense of false security when they talk about the damage to flood and all the damage assessments, What we can reduce and the flooding and all the damage is based on flooding, wind damages isnt included in the new record.

When you have 130 mile an hour winds, you have a lot of damage well away from the the storm surge.

And I think that we need to be more the state has to do something to wake people up.

They are being woken up by the National Flood Insurance Program.

But I just think that I can't get the science, the growing confirmed science on emissions related to sea level rise, the larger hurricanes, because of record temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the rest of the world's oceans, which means bigger storms, higher winds, not just storm surge.

So I just wish they had taken more time to say this is what this is the engine driving our greatest fears.

And now we're planning for and why we're taking some things off the board.

Real quick, Mark.

So the reason that we're in New Orleans and a lot of the other coastal communities of Louisiana are the same is when Bienville and Iberville created the city in 1718.

It's the closest place upriver that we can that's defensible.

Then it was the English.

Today it's sea level rise and surge and the public needs to know that it's their job to assure that Congress and their own local representatives are looking at that risk and making sure that the that the plans that are in place or would be in place in the future assure that they have a place continue to live.

So really, pay attention, pay attention, be active about it and be loud so you can get more information about this master plan that we've been talking about and get more information about it as the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority website at coastal.la.gov And also in the months to come, as we continue our series on challenges and opportunity is the Louisiana coast.

We'll take a look at how the focus on restoring the coast has been a catalyst for development of new technologies, providing economic growth opportunities, and how education is addressing the need for training the workforce of the future to deal with the challenges to maintaining a sustainable coast.

Thanks so much to Mark, to Halle, to Bob.

Ciao Bob.

Thank you all for watching.