Overview
CLIMATE, ENERGY AND THE COAST
The America's WETLAND Foundation (AWF) seeks to ensure a sustainable Gulf Coast, and to define sustainability based on the lessons learned and intellectual capital created around comprehensive coastal protection and restoration. Home to America's WETLAND, the Gulf Coast faces the largest demonstrable sustainability crisis in the nation and is also the center of the world's most important working ecosystem laboratory.
From this region, the best practices in dealing with climate changes, coastal erosion and energy needs can emerge to serve as models for current and potential energy-producing regions around the world. The concept is to look at all problems, not in isolation but in relationship with one another, so that both energy and environmental assets can be sustained in the face of global climate change.
AWF has launched CEC: The New Sustainability, which has several components: the CEC Policy and Information Center, the America's Energy Coast Initiative, building capacity in science and engineering through university collaborations, the Ecosystem Restoration Action Network and the World Deltas Collaborative.
The CEC Policy and Information Center will assess and define information on the linkage of issues around climate, energy and the coast. The Center will promote rigorous, nonpartisan research, study and policy analysis.
Building true science and engineering capacity in the region is critical for the Gulf states, and especially Louisiana, to plan and implement the large-scale ecosystem restoration and protection program it envisions. It will take true collaborations among our universities in the Gulf region to accomplish the research necessary and to respond in urgent time to as this massive program and others needed to sustain the Gulf coast go forward. The idea is to bring together the coast's brainpower to a critical mass that can address the huge sustainability issues.
The Restoration Action Network focuses on working with Congress and Federal agencies to modify and expedite the way coastal ecosystem restoration efforts are addressed. Currently, these projects are authorized through the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), which has proven problematic because of the slow and complicated processes required by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There is urgency to coordinating and unifying the processes. The Network would include America's WETLAND, the Everglades, the Chesapeake Bay area, the Great Lakes, Upper Mississippi, Puget Sound and CalFed.
The World Deltas Collaborative will be a series of summits to bring together representatives of governments, policy makers and scientists from around the world to participate in discussions of sustainability challenges and solutions. Best practices and latest findings will be presented to those interested in deltaic systems such as the Mississippi River, the Nile, the Yangze, MeKong and Amazon.