BBC article... Can oysters save Louisiana’s wetlands?

quote:

---

The salt marsh is also a landscape that is changing, fast. From 1932 to 2016 in Louisiana, on average, open water subsumed a chunk of wetlands the size of a football field every hour. It’s true that the rate of loss has slowed. A football field is now being swallowed every 100 minutes, rather than every 34 minutes, when it was at its peak. This is largely because there hasn’t been a major hurricane since 2008. It’s partly because of restoration activities. And there’s another reason, too. “In recent years it’s reached a slowdown, but that’s because the most vulnerable spots are already gone,”

---

quote:

---

Finished in November 2016, the reef – the first built by the CRCL and The Nature Conservancy in Louisiana – was a massive project. The 1.7 million pounds (771,000kg) of shell used were contributed by 26 local restaurants, including a dozen in New Orleans. This isn’t the world’s only oyster shell recycling programme; there are similar projects in Texas, New York, San Francisco and the Chesapeake Bay, as well as in Australia. But given the number of oysters that are shucked around the world, these programmes are relatively few.

---