Everglades ecosystem restoration: a watershed approach by the legislature.

• Author: Fumero, John J.
• Position: Florida Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

The Everglades were dying. The endless acres of saw grass, brown as an enormous shadow where rain and lake water had once flowed, rustled dry.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass (1947).

As late as the 1800s, the Everglades consisted of a 60-mile-wide shallow river, seldom more than two feet deep, flowing from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. That was before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected 1,400 miles of dikes, dams, levees, and water control structures in the name of water supply and flood control. Now in the year 2000, more than 50 years after Marjorie Stoneman Douglas wrote about the demise of the Everglades, only 2.4 million acres of Everglades remain--about one third of the original Everglades ecosystem. Lake Okeechobee is likewise experiencing adverse ecological impacts. Florida is now at a turning point, ready to begin reversing the effects of massive wetlands drainage, damage to our estuaries and loss of valuable water storage areas.[1] Simply put, a replumbing of the water works which makes central and southern Florida habitable for humans is being proposed.

With an $8 billion price tag, the Central and Southern Florida Project Comprehensive Review Study, or Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) as it is now known, is one of the most ambitious environmental restoration initiatives ever undertaken anywhere in the world. The intent of the CERP is to restore and preserve South Florida's natural ecosystems, including the internationally renowned Everglades and Lake Okeechobee, while protecting and enhancing water supplies and flood control.[2] This undertaking, an unprecedented federal-state partnership, involves an impressive array of scientists, engineers, policymakers, and other professionals from federal, state, regional, and tribal governments working to develop a conceptual road map for environmental restoration.

Background

* The Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project

The Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project (C&SF Project is a massive multipurpose public works project, one of the largest in the world. Over a 20-year period, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and its federal and state partners built an elaborate network of thousands of miles of canals encompassing 18,000 square miles of land.[3]

The C&SF Project includes components intended to handle flood control, regional water supply for agricultural and urban areas, prevention of salt water intrusion, water supply needs to Everglades National Park and other environmental resources, as well as the preservation offish and wildlife, recreation, and navigation.

For more than 50 years, the C&SF Project has performed its assigned functions admirably. Without construction of the C&SF Project, only a fraction of South Florida would be habitable. However, the project also has had extensive unintended and profound adverse effects on many of South Florida's ecosystems.[4] The original nine million square miles of Everglades have been reduced to less than half its original size. There has been an approximately 90 percent reduction in wading bird populations, infestation of over two million acres with exotic vegetation that destroys virtually all natural habitat values, and 1.7 billion acre-feet of freshwater per day wasted through ocean discharges through drainage lands.[5]

* The South Florida Water Management District

The SFWMD is a regional water resource management agency involved in significant ongoing programs to acquire and manage environmentally sensitive lands, regulate water resource impacts of development activities, design and construct ecosystem restoration projects, provide applied scientific research relevant to natural resource issues, and operate a regional water conveyance system for flood protection, water quality, environmental protection, and water supply purposes.

* The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

While many interests have consistently been working to reverse the ecological decline of the Everglades ecosystem over the past three decades, the CERP plan represents the most comprehensive attempt at an ecosystem-wide solution. The recommended plan will change the quantity, quality, timing, and distribution of water in central and south Florida and ensure the quality of life in south Florida.[6]

The U.S. Congress authorized development of the CERP plan of the C&SF Project in 1992 and provided further specific direction and guidance through two resolutions and legislation in 1996.[7] The responsible lead agencies are the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District, and the SFWMD. The responsible cooperating agencies are the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.[8]

Balancing the conflicting needs for water consumption in a rapidly growing south Florida and management of water resources for flood control and environmental restoration is at the heart of the successful implementation of the CERP. Consider this: The constituents for this $8 billion plan include over six million people in the lower east coast of Florida (predicted to be eight million people by 2010!), and an economically productive agricultural...