Posted on August 19, 2024
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the award of $421 million to a group of states and organizations—including North Carolina, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, the N.C. Coastal Federation, and the Nature Conservancy—who partnered to secure the funding.
It is the largest grant in the history of the EPA that is dedicated to using natural solutions to curb the effects of climate change. And the $30 million of that funding that is going to the NC Coastal Federation “is also pretty historic for us too because it’s the largest grant that we’ve ever received,” says Jacob Boyd, the N.C. Coastal Federation’s salt marsh program director.
With this money, the Coastal Federation will be focusing on specific salt marsh restoration and protection efforts across the North Carolina coastline. According to Boyd, the initiative will begin with two key research components to pinpoint where to focus their efforts. The first will involve researching and analyzing salt marsh throughout the state, using data and satellite imagery to assess the condition of the current coastline compared to years past. That will help identify areas with the greatest salt marsh loss and erosion.
The organization will also be analyzing and determining high carbon sequestering and holding areas. As Boyd explains, different coastal habitats hold various amounts of carbon. Salt marsh is one of the highest carbon storing habitats on earth. And when the salt marsh is lost because of erosion, the carbon that it holds goes into the atmosphere and becomes a greenhouse gas, exacerbating climate change impacts.
“So if you do things like restore the salt marsh and protect it so that it doesn’t erode, then it continues to hold that carbon in its soil and doesn’t release it, so it’s not creating more greenhouse gas,” he says.
Based on that analysis, the Coastal Federation will collaborate with its Salt Marsh Steering Committee, which consists of experts from the state, federal agencies, other nonprofits and academia to identify specific projects in areas with high erosion and high carbon.
The next step will be to implement and construct living shorelines in those areas to protect them from erosion. This work focuses on natural methods like using oysters and other materials that are strategically placed in the water to help reduce the wave energy and slow down erosion.
“So that way, those areas aren’t releasing that carbon back out into the atmosphere and also creating all of the benefits that we get from salt marsh, ecological benefits, community resilience benefits, protection from storms, while also holding the carbon in place,” says Boyd, who adds that it also helps create habitats for fish and other organisms in the estuaries.
Overall, the Coastal Federation has about 600 acres of coastal habitat to protect and restore, and the time and funding for each of those initiatives will depend on the size and location of the projects. The grant is designated for a five-year project, and Boyd says the organization will have a timeline finalized and announced by the end of this year.
Once each project site is identified, the process will entail conducting field work on the ground to gather data for engineering that specific salt marsh site, ensuring they use appropriate materials based on environmental factors and wave energy, collaborating with agencies for permitting, and then proceeding with construction after multiple site visits and finalized designs.
The work will also require the manpower of the Coastal Federation staff, volunteers from the community and partners from academia and different agencies. “So we’ll be collaborating with all of them to help collectively leverage resources to get as much done for the good in North Carolina as we can,” says Boyd.
One of the components of the project that Boyd is excited about is finding areas for that align with lower income and disadvantaged communities, and engaging with those communities so they reap the benefits of these living shorelines.
“Because with all the benefits that salt marsh provides to the environment and the ecosystem, it provides just as many benefits to the communities that are around them,” says Boyd. “Because they help filter water and help protect from storm surge and from flooding from storm events. So the more we can protect a lot of those salt marshes around some of these communities, it actually helps build that community resilience to a lot of these impacts we’re seeing from climate change.”
