Mississippi Delta Restoration by John W. Day & Jori A. Erdman

Author:John W. Day & Jori A. Erdman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Quite bluntly, the state is in need of an extraordinary windfall if the LACMP goals are to be met at even current energy prices (Davis and Vorhoff 2014). There is a great amount of embodied energy in the Mississippi flood control system. The levee system must be maintained in order to protect coastal populations and commerce, but doing so will be extraordinarily energy intensive. We have already shown that oil prices and dredging costs have a positive correlation (Fig. 5). The energy intensity of coastal restoration is likely similar to the energy intensity of heavy construction (Day and Moerschbaecher 2014) and the price of heavy construction is highly correlated to the price of petroleum (Fig. 10). From this, we can presume that future increases in energy costs will cause the amount of funding needed to restore the coast to rise. This is a sobering reality for many of the world’s developed deltas. Industrialized deltas that rely on energy-intensive structural protection, such as the Mississippi and the Rhine delta will be at the highest risk of failure in a future with high energy costs (Tessler et al. 2015). This is because the Rhine and Mississippi deltas contain two of the world’s largest ports and have complex urbanized flood control systems. A high percentage of the population in these deltas live in high-risk areas that are below sea level. This type of development is increasingly becoming the case in many of the world’s deltas, such as the Po, Nile, Mekong and Yangtze (Syvitski et al. 2009). Industrialized deltas experienced higher rates of subsidence after drainage and high levels of development (Syvitski et al. 2009). In addition, the flood control systems of these deltas are integrated within complex urban, agricultural, and industrial areas along the coast that make interventions expensive and politically and technically difficult.

To date, no large river diversion has been authorized, while nearly $541 million has been spent or approved for marsh creation (CPRA 2015a). In summer 2016 a milestone for diversion implementation was achieved. The state legislature settled on a program to move oyster leases from grounds where diversions would affect salinity.18 So slowly diversions are gaining ground in the public arena. River diversions were not going to be implemented without a proactive policy to protect and fairly distribute new oyster leases to those affected by diversions. Still, as of the end of 2016 no river diversion had passed beyond the engineering and design phase. Construction of any new diversion is not likely to start until 2020 at the earliest.

Future tends in world energy markets will affect Louisiana ’s ability to execute the LACMP (see chapter “Energy and Climate – Global Trends and Their Implications for Delta Restoration”). If the diversion planning process is delayed beyond 2020, there is a chance that any diversion built will have greater costs and reduced benefits due to increasing energy costs and rates of sea level rise. NPV analyses apply a discount on future returns from investments made in the present, primarily because the future is not guaranteed.

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