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Louisiana on Thursday canceled a $3 billion repair of its disappearing Gulf coastline, funded by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement, scrapping what conservationists called an urgent response to climate change but Gov. Jeff Landry viewed as a threat to the state’s way of life.
Despite years of studies and reviews, the project at the center of Louisiana’s coastal protection plans grew increasingly imperiled after Landry took office last year. Its collapse means that the state could lose out on more than $1.5 billion in unspent funds and may even have to repay the $618 million it already used to begin building.
The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a mix of federal agencies overseeing the settlement funds, says that “unused project funds will be available for future Deepwater Horizon restoration activities” but would require review and approval.
The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project aimed to rebuild upward of 20 square miles of land over a 50-year period in southeast Louisiana to combat sea level rise and erosion on the Gulf Coast. When construction stalled last year because of lawsuits, trustees warned that the state would have to return the hundreds of millions of dollars it had already spent if the project did not move forward.
Former U.S. Rep. Garret Graves of Baton Rouge, who once led the state’s coastal restoration agency, says that killing the project was “a boneheaded decision” not rooted in science.
“It is going to result in one of the largest setbacks for our coast and the protection of our communities in decades,” Graves says. “I don’t know what chiropractor or palm reader they got advice from on this, but baffling that someone thought this was a good idea.”
Project supporters stressed that it would have provided a data-driven, large-scale solution to mitigate the worst effects of an eroding coastline in a state where a football field of land is lost every 100 minutes and more than 2,000 square miles of land has vanished over the past century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The project, which broke ground in 2023, would have diverted sediment-laden water from the Mississippi River to restore wetlands disappearing because of a range of factors including climate-change-induced sea level rise and a vast river levee system that choked off natural land regeneration from sediment deposits.
“The science has not changed, nor has the need for urgent action,” says Kim Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. “What has changed is the political landscape.”
The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group last year had noted that “no other single restoration project has been planned and studied as extensively over the past decades.”
