The expanding vision of Everglades restoration: a tool to fight climate change in South Florida
In Florida’s battle against climate change, the Everglades are among the primary victims at risk from rising seas — but could also prove a powerful tool to slow global warming and protect South Florida from future flooding.
Activists, government officials and politicians plan to discuss the complicated, controversial (and, they say, hopeful) future of climate change and Everglades restoration Friday and Saturday in the Florida Keys at the 37th annual Everglades Coalition Conference.
“It’s a very crucial moment,” said Richard Grosso, head of the Florida Keys chapter of the Izaak Walton League, a conservation group. “We’ve got good people running government now and an opportunity to make progress that we haven’t made in recent years.”
Everglades restoration has historically been a bipartisan issue in Florida that earned strong support from South Florida Republicans, a trend Grosso said he expects to continue. That, combined with support from a Democrat-controlled U.S. House, Senate and White House could spell progress for restoration efforts, he said.
Miami-Dade County, the largest local government in South Florida, is on the cusp of some key decisions that will impact the future of the Everglades, like whether to extend a state highway into the Everglades or expand the county’s urban development boundary and allow an 800-acre new development near Biscayne Bay.
“Those are the kinds of decisions that will make or break restoration efforts,” Grosso said. “The challenge of restoration is so daunting that we have to pretty much get everything right. It’s not good enough for local governments to do some bad things and some good things, all the stars have to align if we’re gonna pull off the most ambitious restoration project in human history.”
The restoration effort consists of dozens of interrelated projects attempting to restore the flow of fresh water from the center of the state into Florida Bay, the way it was before the Everglades were drained, shaped and developed into one of the most densely populated regions in the country.
One recent success story is the Kissimmee River Restoration Project, a major project 22 years in the making to restore the oxbow bends and twists in the Kissimmee River and the natural ecosystem that surrounds it. It was completed last summer.
Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, called it a “visible example of where we imitated what Mother Nature did in the first place.” She sees this ambitious project as a sign that the federal government is open to more nature-based solutions to water control, something environmental advocates have been asking for for decades.
“There is still an instinct toward the gray infrastructure, and over-engineering the system is what got Florida and the Everglades into trouble in the first place,” she said. “We can’t engineer our way out of climate change threats.”
The call for nature-based solutions, and the interest from federal and state government in them, reflect a shift away from viewing the Glades primarily as a flood risk to be managed and toward a view of the ecosystem as a tool to solve multiple problems at once.
If wielded correctly, experts say the river of grass could hold bavck the saltwater intrusion that threatens to flood South Florida and pollute its water supply. And, newer science shows, it could also slow down global warming.
Centuries of growth and death and decay in the Everglades have created rich layers of peat soil that not only help the famous sawgrass marshes flourish but also store an incredible amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that accelerates global warming.
Evelyn Gaiser, a professor of biological science at Florida International University, said in the last 100 years of drainage, quite a bit of that peat has been lost, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere.
“What we’re concerned about is losing even more carbon as a result of saltwater intrusion driven by sea level rise unabated by freshwater flows,” she said.
If sea level rise continues to creep inland in South Florida, it exposes the sawgrass and peat marshes to saltwater that it isn’t equipped to handle. Those marshes die when exposed to excess saltwater, causing the peat soils beneath them to collapse and release carbon dioxide.
The solution, Gaiser said, is more freshwater to the southern ends of the Glades to hold back the invading saltwater.
“If we can enhance that freshwater flow we buy time for the Everglades to adapt to sea rise and other climate threats and provide the Everglades the opportunity to mitigate other aspects of climate change,” she said.
Marisa Carrozzo, co-chair of the Everglades Coalition and senior coastal wildlife and program manager with the National Parks Conservation Association, said this is the first time the coalition’s annual meeting is focused so closely on the complex relationship between the Everglades and climate change.
“I think it’s becoming progressively more front of mind for everyone that this is one of our best strategies for mitigating some of the worst impacts of climate change,” she said.
This story was originally published January 7, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
