Conservation Strategies

          Due to the deterioration of coastal wetlands in the United States, efforts have been made to devise effective conservation strategies to halt their destruction and potentially aid in their recovery. Wetlands are not only among the most biodiverse habitats, but can also serve as natural speed bumps to approaching hurricanes by starving them of warm ocean water and creating physical barriers to surging flood waters. However, in the last hundred years, the combined forces of human development and increasingly extreme storms have turned thousands of square miles of wetlands in the U.S. into open water.  One strategy to address this issue is government regulation. By 1984, over half of all the wetlands in the U.S. had been drained or filled for development or agriculture. Congress responded to these figures by passing two wetland conservation and restoration programs administered by National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to slow or reverse these trends. These two programs are the Wetland Conservation Provisions which was authorized in the 1985 Farm Bill, and the Wetlands Reserve Program which was later authorized in the 1990 Farm Bill. These bills put into law restrictions on pollution, such as requiring more strict run-off protocols, which resulted in reduced agricultural impacts on wetlands. Through these two programs, NRCS works with farmers and ranchers to maintain or increase important wetland benefits, while ensuring the farmers' ability to continue to produce crops. Another strategy is to better communicate the economic benefit of healthy wetlands, in order to incentivize the private sector to take action. Using the latest modeling techniques, researchers from the conservation, engineering, and insurance sectors studied the impact of Hurricane Sandy in the northeast United States in 2012, when New York and New Jersey were badly hit by storm surges. The study determined that more than $625 million in property damages were prevented during this catastrophe due to wetlands along the Northeast coast. Promoting these advantages of wetlands may result in greater consideration in coastal development and habitat restoration decisions, and may provide greater incentives in the private sector to design their development projects in a sustainable way so as to conserve and restore these natural habitats.