A sense of urgency is needed to fight coastal land loss in Louisiana, the state’s coastal restoration chief said Thursday at Nicholls State University.
“This is a critical issue because we’re behind the eight ball,” said John Bradberry, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority executive director. The Houma Courier reports Bradberry’s address was part of the advocacy group Restore or Retreat’s day-long program titled “Working for Our Coast: How Our Environment and Economy Can Work Together.”
He said Louisiana has lost 25% of its land to coastal erosion since the early part of the 20th century. Even though the state makes up 37% of the coastal land in the United States, 90% of the coastal land loss occurs in Louisiana, Bradberry noted.
“Louisiana’s problem is that we have a huge issue. It sometimes feels overwhelming, immovable. There’s a lot of adjectives that you can use for the problem,” Bradberry said. “I can see what happened over the last 50 years. For the younger generation today, it’s a different paradigm.”
The amount of land loss in Louisiana since 1932 is equivalent to losing an area that is three times the size of Houston and 3.8 times the size of Los Angeles, Bradberry said.
CPRA is currently working on the 2017 Coastal Master Plan, which Bradberry said will alter predictions and be more in depth than the plans in the past. Models have been updated to reflect new information.
The plan will be finalized and submitted to the Legislature for approval in April next year.
