In San Francisco Bay, salt ponds created more than a century ago are reverting to marshland. Along the New York and New Jersey coasts, beaches ravaged by Superstorm Sandy underwent extensive restoration. In Alabama, a rebuilt spit of land is shielding a historic town and providing wildlife habitat.

Coastal communities nationwide are ramping up efforts to fend off rising seas, higher tides and stronger storm surges that are chewing away at coastlines, pushing saltwater farther inland and threatening ecosystems and communities.

The need for coastal restoration has been in the spotlight this month after Louisiana officials canceled a $3 billion project because of objections from the fishing industry and concerns about rising costs. The Mid-Barataria project was projected to rebuild more than 20 square miles of land over about 50 years by diverting sediment-laden water from the Mississippi River.

But work on many other projects continues in Louisiana and around the country, including barrier islands, saltwater marshes, shellfish reefs and other natural features that provided protection before they were destroyed or degraded by development. Communities are also building flood walls, berms and levees to protect areas that lack adequate natural protection.

The work has become more urgent as climate change causes more intense and destructive storms and leads to sea-level rise that puts hundreds of communities and tens of millions of people at risk, scientists say.

“The sooner we can make these coastlines more resilient the better,” said Doug George, a geological oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Gulf Coast

In the U.S., perhaps nowhere is more vulnerable than the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast. Louisiana alone has lost more than 2,000 square miles of coastline — more than any other state — over the past century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Historically, sediment deposited by the Mississippi River and others rebuilt land and nourished shore-buffering marshes. But that function was disrupted by the construction of channels and levees, along with other developments.

The dangers were magnified in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina breached flood walls and levees, submerging 80 percent of New Orleans and killing almost 1,400 people. Then Hurricane Rita followed.

Afterward, the state formed the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to lessen risks from storm surges and stem land loss.

In the past 20 years, nearly $18 billion was spent on mitigation efforts — mostly to shore up levees, flood walls and other structures, the authority said.

Dozens of other projects are completed, planned or under way. Marshes and other habitats are being rebuilt with sediment dredged from waterways and river flow is being restored to areas that have lacked it for years.

On Louisiana’s Chandeleur Islands, a barrier island chain, the state will pump in sand to help rebuild them, which will dampen storm surges and benefit sea turtles and other wildlife, said Katie Freer-Leonards, who leads development of the state’s 2029 coastal master plan.

The authority is digging a channel to allow water and sediment from the Mississippi River to flow into part of Maurepas Swamp, a roughly 218-square-mile forested wetland northwest of New Orleans that has been “dying for over a century” because of levees, project manager Brad Miller said.

Sediment dredged from elsewhere also has been pumped into thousands of acres of sinking marshes to nourish them and raise their levels.

The same is happening in other states.

In Bayou La Batre, Alabama — a fishing village built in the late 1700s — The Nature Conservancy built breakwaters offshore, and then pumped in sediment and built ridges that are now covered with vegetation. That created a “speed bump” that has helped protect the town from erosion, said Judy Haner, the Alabama Nature Conservancy’s coastal programs director.

The conservancy and others also have been creating miles of oyster reefs and acquiring tracts of land away from the coast to allow habitats to move as seawater encroaches.

Such efforts won’t prevent all land losses, but in Louisiana, “cumulatively, they could make a big difference,” said Denise Reed, a research scientist who is working on Louisiana’s coastal master plan. “It could buy us some time.”

Pacific Coast

On the West Coast, communities vulnerable to sea-level rise also could see more flooding from increasingly intense atmospheric rivers, which carry water vapor from the ocean and dump huge amounts of rain in a short period of time.

So, tidal marshes and estuaries drained for agriculture and industry are being restored along the entire coast, both for habitat and coastal protection.

Habitat restoration, not climate change, was the primary consideration when planning began about 20 years ago to restore marshland along the south end of San Francisco Bay, destroyed when ponds were created to harvest sea salt.

But as sediment naturally fills in ponds and marsh plants return, “we’re realizing that … marshes absorb wave energy, storm surge and the force of high tides,” said Dave Halsing, executive project manager at the California State Coastal Conservancy.

That helps protect whatever is behind them, including sea walls and land that otherwise could be inundated or washed away, including some of California’s most expensive real estate, near Silicon Valley.

Projects also are under way along Alaska’s coast and in Hawaii, where native residents are rebuilding ancient rocky enclosures originally intended to trap fish, but that also protect against storm surge.

Atlantic Coast

Thirteen years after Superstorm Sandy swamped the Atlantic coast, communities still are restoring natural buffers and building other protective structures.

Sandy began as a routine hurricane in 2012 before merging with other storms, stretching for a record 1,000 miles and pushing enormous amounts of ocean water into coastal communities.

But the threat of future storm surges could be even greater because sea levels in some areas could rise as much as three feet within 50 years, said Donald E. Cresitello, a coastal engineer and senior coastal planner for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps rebuilt beaches, dunes and human-made structures from Massachusetts to Virginia and now is turning to areas farther inland that are increasingly vulnerable to more powerful storm surges, Cresitello said.

“If there’s a river coming to the coast, that storm surge has the potential to just ride up that river,” depending on the storm, he said.

A “phenomenal amount” of the U.S. population lives and works along its coasts, so protecting those areas is important to the U.S. economy, said George, the NOAA scientist. But it is also important to preserve generations of culture, he said.

“When you think about why people should care … it’s a whole way of life,” he said.

Editor’s note: Associated Press video journalist Stephen Smith contributed to this report.

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BATON ROUGE, La. — An ambitious project to restore a rapidly vanishing stretch of Louisiana coastline that was devastated by the 2010 Gulf oil spill has been thrown deeper into disarray amid claims by Gov. Jeff Landry that his predecessor concealed an unfavorable study that it was feared could imperil the estimated $2.92 billion effort.

The controversy was even predicted by the previous administration as it grappled with how to handle conflicting environmental analyses for the project, according to a confidential memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The nine-page document, prepared by five attorneys working for then-Gov. John Bel Edwards‘ administration, sheds new light on a study Landry says was improperly withheld from the public and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as it was approving a permit for the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project.

The stakes were so high the attorneys even weighed whether state officials could face federal charges for withholding from the Corps a report that the diversion would generate significantly less land than another modeling projection used in a federal review.

Prosecution seemed “extremely unlikely,” the lawyers wrote to the heads of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which oversees the diversion project, but they added that “the severe consequences and criminalization of the action warranted mention.”

The attorneys also warned that the Corps might suspend or revoke the permit if it discovered the study after the fact, the 2022 memo shows, foreshadowing actions taken last month when the Corps cited “deliberately withheld” information among its reasons for suspending its permit for the project. The move halts construction despite more than half a billion dollars being spent.

“They hid the bad stuff and only showed the (Corps) the version they liked,” Landry wrote in a post on X. “Science is easy when you just delete the inconvenient parts!”

Edwards denied his administration withheld information from the Corps and stated that “Gov. Landry’s accusations are demonstrably false.”

“When all the facts are presented, the public will see that his administration has played political games and botched this important project,” Edwards stated.

Landry countered in his own statement that “the facts speak for themselves.”

Amid the finger-pointing, conservation proponents have called the report in question a red herring that Landry is using to tank the project. The diversion, funded mostly from a settlement arising from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, is the largest of its kind in Louisiana’s history.

Possible legal consequences

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion would puncture levees in southeast Louisiana, diverting some of the river’s sediment-rich flow to restore wetlands. The long-delayed project was intended to mitigate a disappearing coastline caused by a range of factors such as climate change-induced sea-level rise and the river’s vast levee system. Ground was broken in 2023, but state and federal litigation has stalled it.

Opponents have blasted its ballooning cost and crippling effects on the local fishing and oyster industries. Landry has said the project would “break” Louisiana’s culture of shrimp and oyster harvesting, likening it to government efforts a century ago to punish schoolchildren for speaking Cajun French.

Earlier this year, Landry’s administration approached the Corps with a list of concerns about the project, including a 2022 study it said “does not appear to have been disclosed to the public nor considered by all necessary persons within the Corps.”

Officials working for the state at the time defended how the report in question was handled, saying it had been focused on analyzing maintenance and operational costs related to the diversion and was not intended to be part of the federal environmental impact statement process.

The report, prepared by AECOM Technical Services and a subcontractor, produced “inconsistent” results such as a significantly lower projected land creation — as few as 7 square miles compared to the 21 square miles estimated under the primary model, according to the confidential memo.

Officials familiar with the study said its lower projection resulted from improperly accounting for sea level rise and underestimating the river’s flow. The memo also pointed to the need for “significant dredging” to maintain the diversion channel, which Landry’s administration now says will cost tens of millions of dollars.

In the memo, the attorneys outlined a series of “reputational concerns” about withholding the study and warned it would be more difficult to keep “controlling the narrative” if the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority “is on the defensive.”

An informal discussion

The memo noted the Corps and other federal agencies could delay the project for years if they attempted to integrate the modeling results into their environmental impact analysis. Failing to formally disclose the modeling results to federal agencies like the Corps, the attorneys warned, also would leave the project vulnerable to litigation.

They suggested the Edwards administration “informally discuss” the issue with federal agencies and then strategize the best way to “formally” enter it into the public record for the agencies to review.

The report’s findings eventually were verbally communicated to at least one Corps official, who indicated it was insignificant, according to multiple former Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority officials familiar with the exchange. But the complete analysis itself was not submitted into the public record, nor was the official’s response at the time, they said.

The former state officials weren’t authorized to discuss internal deliberations and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

Col. Cullen Jones, head of the Corps’ New Orleans District, told Landry’s administration last month that the Corps recently conducted a “technical review” of the modeling analysis in question and concluded it “would not affect” the permit.

But Jones said the Corps suspended the project’s permit in part because “the state deliberately withheld information … that the state knew it should provide.”

Project’s future in doubt

The Corps also pointed to actions taken by Landry’s administration, including a 90-day work stoppage announced last month amid plans to study an alternative “smaller diversion” and claims the state can’t afford the project.

It’s unclear how Landry intends to respond to the permit’s suspension. The state could dispute the permit suspension. At that point, the Corps could revoke or modify the permit as it sees fit.

Louisiana’s coastal agency earmarked about $573 million in its 2025 budget for the project, an amount now being reviewed by the legislature. Last fall, federal agencies tasked with managing Deepwater Horizon settlement money warned that if Louisiana backs out of or alters the Mid-Barataria Diversion project, money allocated for it would need to be returned.

Lauren Bourg, director of the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, told lawmakers that ending or altering the project “sends the message that any infrastructure project in this state may be undone by a few stakeholders who engage in politics with the right people, distorting the scientific and engineering principles upon which all of these projects are grounded.”

But many people in southeast Louisiana’s fishing industry applauded the move to halt the project.

“If all this water comes down, it’s going to kill everything,” said Mitch Jurisich, chairman of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force.

Editor’s note: Brook reported from New Orleans.

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