The Louisiana coastal plain remains the largest expanse of coastal wetlands in the contiguous United States. The coastal wetlands, built by the land building or "deltaic" processes of the Mississippi River, contain an extraordinary diversity of estuarine habitats that range from narrow natural levee and beach ridges to expanses of forested swamps and fresh, brackish, and saline marshes. Taken as a whole, the unique interplay of habitats — with their hydrological connections to each other, upland areas, the Gulf of Mexico, and migratory routes of birds, fish, and other species — combines to place the coastal wetlands of Louisiana among the Nation’s most productive and important natural assets.

In human terms, these coastal wetlands have historically been a culturally diverse center for social development. Additionally, the coastal wetlands protect an internationally significant commercial-industrial complex from the destructive forces of storm-driven waves and tides. This complex includes deep-draft ports that handle the Nation’s waterborne commerce and the most active segment of the Nation’s Intracoastal Waterway. In conservation terms, Louisiana’s coast is at the end of the Central and Mississippi Flyways, and nearly 70 percent of the waterfowl migrating along these flyways winter there. Coastal Louisiana also provides critical stopover habitat for Neotropical migratory songbirds, as well as for other avian species. Furthermore, coastal Louisiana provides critical nesting habitat for many species of water birds such as the endangered brown pelican. These economic and habitat values, which depend on the biological productivity of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, merit national attention.

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands were built up by Mississippi River floodwaters that deposited enormous volumes of sediment and nutrients onto the continental shelf at its mouth. These sediments were eroded from the lands of the vast Mississippi River basin in the interior of North America. For the last several thousand years, the dominance of the deltaic processes resulted in a net increase of more than 4 million acres of coastal wetlands. In addition, these deltaic processes created an extensive skeleton of higher natural levee ridges along the past and present Mississippi River channels, distributaries, and bayous in the deltaic plain and created the beach ridges of the chenier deltaic plain. The landscape that these processes produced gave rise to one of the most productive ecosystems on earth. Only the most intensively managed agricultural systems that are artificially subsidized by large inputs of energy and fertilizer could possibly rival the ability of these estuarine wetlands to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into biomass.

Today, most of the Mississippi River’s fresh water, nutrients, and sediments are channeled out to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, bypassing the coastal wetlands where they would otherwise naturally build land and nourish the estuarine ecosystems. Deprived of the sediments provided by the deltaic processes, the estuarine wetlands continue to sink, or subside, as they have always done, but now lack the net land- building effect of unconstrained deltaic processes. Deprived of the natural sustenance provided by nutrients in the intermittently flooded zones in which they are adapted to live, the plants that define the surface of the coastal wetlands die off. Once the coastal wetlands are denuded, the fragile substrate is left exposed to — and unprotected from — the erosive tidal environment.

Coastal Louisiana has lost over 900,000 acres since the 1930s. As recently as the 1970s, the loss rate for Louisiana’s coastal wetlands was as high as 25,600 acres per year. The current rate of loss is about 16,000 acres per year. It is estimated that coastal Louisiana will experience a 320,000-acre net loss by the year 2050. The cumulative effect of human activities in the coastal area has been to drastically tilt the natural balance from the net land- building deltaic processes to land loss caused by altered hydrology, subsidence, and erosion. Approximately 30 percent of the land losses being experienced in coastal Louisiana are due to natural causes; the remaining 70 percent are attributable to the effects on the environment, both direct and indirect.

In 1990, passage of the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA; PL-101-646, Title 111), locally referred to as the Breaux Act, provided authorization and funding for a multi-agency task force to begin actions to curtail wetland losses. In 1998, after extensive studies and construction of a number of coastal restoration projects accomplished under CWPPRA, the State of Louisiana and the Federal agencies charged with restoring and protecting the remainder of Louisiana’s valuable coastal wetlands adopted a new coastal restoration plan in 1998. The underlying principles of the new plan, “Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana,”, are to restore and mimic the natural processes that built and maintained coastal Louisiana. This plan necessitates basin-scale action to restore more natural hydrology and sediment introduction processes; it subdivides Louisiana’s coastal zone into four regions with a total of nine hydrologic basins. The plan proposes ecosystem restoration strategies that would result in efforts larger in scale than any that have been implemented in the past.

The Coast 2050 Plan report served as the basis for a Federal 905(b) Reconnaissance Report for undertaking feasibility studies in 2000 to seek Water Resources Development Act approval of a comprehensive plan and authorization of major projects beyond what was being pursued under CWPPRA. In 2000, it was envisioned that a series of feasibility reports would be prepared over a 10-year period. The first feasibility efforts focused on the Barataria Bay basin and involved marsh creation and barrier shoreline restoration. Early in fiscal year 2002, however, it was recognized that a more indepth, comprehensive study was needed. This comprehensive study could be used early on to present to Congress a Comprehensive Plan and could be submitted later to Congress for programmatic approval.

To fulfill the need, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA), Louisiana Ecosystem Restoration Study was initiated. Subsequent to authorization, detailed studies are completed on features of the Comprehensive Plan. As envisioned, these feature studies result in project implementation reports (PIRs), which are in detail sufficient for preparing plans and specifications to implement the proposed projects.