By Simone Maloz
Campaign Director, Restore the Mississippi River Delta, and 2025 National Wetlands Awardee
This year marks several milestone anniversaries in Louisiana that continue to shape our coast today—20 years since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated our state, and 15 years since the Deepwater Horizon disaster took the lives of 11 men and spilled oil into the Gulf and onto our shores for 87 days. It also marks 20 years since I began my work in coastal Louisiana. I’d like to share reflections from those times of crisis and the opportunities that followed—perspectives I hope will resonate with other climate-vulnerable communities.
Historically, Louisiana was losing a football field of land every hour, yet state efforts to urgently address wetland restoration and hurricane protection were conceptually separate, unorganized, and managed by different agencies. But after Katrina and Rita, Louisiana knew it could no longer do business the same way and expect different results. With a surge of political will and community resolve, the state created the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) and demanded the development of a comprehensive coastal master plan and an annual, prioritized implementation plan. In 2007, Louisiana released its first integrated plan for coastal restoration and hurricane protection, providing a unified framework for CPRA to implement. That same year, Louisiana backed up its coastal commitment by voting to establish a recurring revenue stream for coastal projects by dedicating future offshore royalty revenues to the Coastal Trust Fund—a move that would prove critical in the years ahead. Being part of the early planning processes as rules and norms were still forming was a fortunate mix of timing and opportunity for me professionally—and, in hindsight, those policy milestones have had lasting meaning for the place I call home.
In 2010, our coast was rocked in a different way by the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) tragedy. After the immediate emergency response, we saw the impacts to natural resources and recreational use unfold all summer, affecting people, communities and entire ecosystems, none more than the Barataria Basin in Southeast Louisiana. As DWH settlement talks began, Louisiana was already advancing its science-based plan—using modeling to guide project selection and setting a realistic budget to reflect that the state's needs would always exceed available resources. This improved, science-based and publicly informed plan balanced restoration and protection, guiding how settlement funds were spent. Once again, Louisiana’s readiness aligned with timing and opportunity—its roadmap and community voices were key to influencing how oil spill penalties were allocated.
The plans of 2012 and 2017 continued to reflect a balance between protection and restoration while looking at both the near- and long-term needs of our coast. Those plans also contained an understanding of the limitations we faced, including a lack of time, natural resources, and funding. We plowed ahead, heads down, making significant progress on implementing nearly $5 billion in ecosystem restoration projects that included reconstructing nearly every barrier island, the significant restoration of ridges, the creation of marsh creation projects larger than anywhere in North America, improvements to levees and evacuation routes, and even the implementation of non-structural elements to elevate homes to reduce risk. The most significant projects of all, river diversions were also set into motion. These diversions were designed to strategically correct nearly a century of manmade flood control efforts that had accelerated coastal wetland loss in Louisiana by reconnecting the Mississippi River to its wetland estuaries through a controlled gated structure. These diversions have been critical elements of every coastal plan dating back before the state’s master plan, but were too large, complex, and costly to implement until the oil spill funds became available.
Coinciding with the release of the 2023 Coastal Master Plan, CPRA finally broke ground on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the linchpin project of the coastal master plan and one essential for the restoration of the Barataria Basin. This historic moment was the culmination of nearly 10 years of public meetings and input from hundreds of documented community interactions and touchpoints of every type. It built on the contribution of expertise by thousands of professionals who prepared the designs, permits, and approvals. It required the securing of nearly $3 billion for construction costs and represented the apogee of decades or more of research, study, and planning that indicated that this was the best way to achieve sustainability for southeast Louisiana. All told, the project would have built or sustained 20-40 square miles of wetlands, created thousands of skilled and well-paying jobs in the region, and provide hundreds of millions of dollars to the local economy while also reducing flooding for communities outside of the levee system and providing an influx of funds to help fishers adapt to changing conditions.
Tides changed in the spring of 2024 when the project—and the decade of discussion, planning and investment into Louisiana’s sustainable future—was denigrated and put on hold by a new governor and new coastal leadership. Now, over a year later, the state’s boldest solution for our coastal crisis today and strongest river reconnection barely has a heartbeat.
This act of self-sabotage not only takes a vital tool out of Louisiana’s restoration toolbox, but also challenges the decades invested in a science-based planning process and the value of community input. It undermines the confidence of those making investment decisions to fund Louisiana’s coastal projects, damages the strong tradition of nonpartisanship that has been synonymous with the existential crisis of our coast, and prompts tough conversations along our coast about our risk and our future. If we can’t build the large projects we need, are we prepared for the conversation of “restore or retreat?” While I do not have the answer to that question, I do know that after two decades working in coastal communities and on coastal issues, one thing is clear: the people of Louisiana’s coast must be at the center of any future conversation. Today’s challenges are of a different nature than those of 20 and 15 years ago, but it is still our responsibility to ensure that future conversations are honest, transparent, and free from political pressure—and are conducted with the entire community’s needs in mind.
Are we up for that next challenge? Our future depends on it.