Earth Economics Report
Cited in Massive Science Article
“Louisiana is losing about a football field’s worth of wetlands every 100 minutes.”
The article, It will take over one billion dollars to protect one small Louisiana town from climate change, takes a deeper look at the increasing regularity of flood risk in Southeastern Louisiana and the threat it poses to homes and property.
“The land erodes away into open water because the levees preventing the Mississippi River from flooding its banks have also channeled all of the river’s sediment out into the Gulf of Mexico. Soil that used to fan out slowly over inland marshes and help build land in the delta during regular flooding is now spit out to sea in deeper channels. A 2010 report by Earth Economics found that these wetlands provide ecosystem services worth between $12 and $47 billion annually.”
The 2010 Earth Economics report, Gaining Ground: Wetlands, Hurricanes, and the Economy: The Value of Restoring the Mississippi River Delta is a comprehensive measure of the economic value of Mississippi River Delta natural systems.