The Impact of Global Climate Change and Energy Scarcity on Mississippi Delta Restoration

Abstract

Global climate change and increasing energy cost and scarcity pose significant threats to ecological and social systems of the coastal zone and to the restoration of the Mississippi delta. In coming decades, these two factors will affect how much land can be built and maintained and dictate how sediment is delivered to the delta plain. In this chapter we review climate and energy issues and discuss their significance for coastal restoration. Climate change will likely lead to accelerated sea-level rise, more intense hurricanes, highly variable flow of the Mississippi River with both more large floods and very low water years. Increasing energy scarcity will likely make energy intensive activities such as building and maintaining levees, and pumping slurried sediments much more costly. It will be necessary to come up with energy-efficient projects that require less fossil energy for operation and maintenance so that performance is not hampered by energy scarcity or cost in the future. This argues for river diversions because once built, they are very efficient to operate. The more delta restoration and river management can depend on natural processes, the more cost-effective (from both economic and energy perspectives) restoration will be. Because of escalating climate change impacts and increases in the cost of energy, time is of the essence in terms of jumpstarting a large-scale sediment-reintroduction restoration program.  This evidence indicates that there will be a window of time in the next one to two decades when climate impacts and energy costs are still moderate. This is the time to put resources into improving existing diversions and building new ones.