The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management has announced more than $43 million in grants to improve the resilience of local communities and wildlife habitat in the face of increasingly severe and frequent natural disasters.
The grants will support natural and nature-based infrastructure that will help people and wildlife recover from hurricanes Michael and Florence, Typhoon Yutu, and the California coastal wildfires of 2018, and be better prepared for future events.
The 27 grants awarded will support projects in Alabama, California, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The grantees will also receive more than $54.7 million in funds from other sources to generate a total conservation impact of nearly $98 million.
“This new Emergency Coastal Resilience Fundoffsite link supports conservation projects that strengthen natural systems at a scale that will help protect coastal communities in the states that were impacted by these disasters from the future impacts of storms, floods, wildfires and other natural hazards,” said Jeff Trandahl, CEO and executive director of NFWF . “These same projects also improve the ecological integrity and functionality of coastal ecosystems to support populations of fish and wildlife.”
The projects supported by these new grants are expected to protect or enhance more than 20 miles of shoreline and nearly 8,000 acres of wildlife habitat.
These 27 projects will use nature-based infrastructure such as living shorelines, wetlands, dunes, coastal forests, floodplain habitat and coral reefs to achieve the dual benefits of improving human community resilience while also improving the ecological integrity of coastal ecosystems that enhance fish and wildlife habitats.