Federal and state officials announced today before the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force major revisions to the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP).  Consisting of almost 70 individual restoration projects, CERP is moving forward through projects scattered throughout South Florida, but major ecological decline of the Everglades ecosystem continues.  Audubon has long called for faster progress toward restoring the historic River of Grass, through such means as bundling projects together for more comprehensive planning and speedier implementation. See Audubon's 2008 Tipping Point Fact Sheet.

The new plan, to be developed over 18 months, calls for such action in order to get projects moving forward at a faster pace.  A decade worth of projects will be evaluated for achieving on-the-ground results quicker than the original CERP plan could deliver.  The new plan was prompted by recent National Academy of Sciences reports detailing the decline of the Everglades ecosystem and the urgent need to expedite restoration progress before the ecosystem degraded to a point from which it was unlikely to recover.

Audubon applauds this initiative to hasten the recovery of the Everglades ecosystem, which suffers from decades of decline caused by over-drainage, water pollution, and water diversion which inundates some areas with too much freshwater, while Everglades National Park and other areas receive far too little.