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Fluvial infrastructure management

A river delta in transition

Nature Sustainability (2023)Cite this article

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The world’s largest deltas, home to numerous megacities, are expected to bear the brunt of climate-driven sea-level rise. Now, a study shows that disentangling the human impacts on the Mississippi Delta in the past century can help make these systems more resilient.

Wetland loss in coastal Louisiana ranks among the most severe environmental disasters in the United States. About 5,000 km2 of land has been lost in the past century and the present-day rate is commonly cited as one football field every 100 minutes. This is a major problem due to the importance of these ecosystems as biogeochemical reactors that drive nutrient cycling and carbon storage, as providers of storm protection, and their key role in sustaining commercially important marine life and bolstering biodiversity more broadly. A long history of research has identified the drivers of wetland loss in this region1, but quantifying the contributing processes has only rarely been attempted2. Writing in Nature Sustainability, Edmonds and colleagues3 do so by means of numerical modelling of wetland change for a representative portion of the Mississippi Delta.

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Fig. 1: Building with nature in the Mississippi Delta.

CPRA

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  1. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Torbjörn E. Törnqvist

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  1. Torbjörn E. Törnqvist
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Correspondence to Torbjörn E. Törnqvist.

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Törnqvist, T.E. A river delta in transition. Nat Sustain (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01104-w

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