2 days ago
Trump administration cuts could impact efforts to shrink Gulf ‘dead zone'
An aerial view of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, on June 7, 2024. Nutrients from throughout the Mississippi River basin wash down into the Gulf of Mexico, creating an annual 'dead zone' of low oxygen conditions. Aerial support provided by SouthWings. Credit: La'Shance Perry, The Lens
Annual forecasts for the Gulf 'dead zone' at the mouth of the Mississippi River predicts the section of water with low oxygen levels will be about average in size this year.
What's less certain is whether government efforts to reduce its size will falter as the Trump administration scales back agencies involved in the process.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts the dead zone will be around 5,500 square miles this summer. Some estimates suggest it will be a little smaller, including those from LSU research scientists Nancy Rabalais and R. Eugene Turner. Their study predicts the hypoxic zone to be around 4,800 square miles, taking into account how warmer water temperatures have altered the Gulf's complex food web, helping reduce the dead zone.
The different models share one key element: their predicted size is about three times bigger than experts would like to see it.
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When nitrogen and phosphorus from farming fertilizers upriver washes down to the Gulf, the excess nutrients can cause algae to bloom near the surface of the water. When the algae dies and decomposes, it sinks into the water and depletes the oxygen fish and other aquatic life need to survive.
The hypoxic conditions affect commercial and recreational fishing as well as cause ecological harm.
Efforts to reduce nutrient runoff into the Gulf are largely outlined in the Environmental Protection Agency's Hypoxia Task Force Action Plan. Long-term, its goal is to reduce the dead zone to about 1,900 square miles by 2035. Its short-term objective is to drop the amount nitrogen and phosphorus emptying into the Gulf by 20%.
Data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), an integral agency in predicting the annual size of the dead zone, found the river's phosphorus load was up 31% but its nitrate levels were about 24% below average in May.
That's just a snapshot from a single month, said Doug Daigle, an LSU coastal research scientist and coordinator for the Louisiana Hypoxia Working Group, a state-based organization working to address the Gulf's dead zone. He emphasized that multi-year data will give the most accurate picture into whether the U.S. is on target to meet its goals.
'Obviously, you don't like it to be bigger in the years when it's bigger, but then we also need to keep it in perspective in years when it's smaller. It's the trend over time that we're looking at,' he said. 'And we're not at square one.'
Whether key federal agencies such as the USGS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will have sufficient funding and manpower to gauge if reduction goals are even being met is uncertain, Daigle said.
'There's a lot of question marks about what's happening to the federal agencies and their capacity … between the mass firings and all the other things that are happening,' he said.
Large sections of NOAA staff have been reduced, and USGS research and data collection funding faces millions of dollars in cutbacks.
Daigle added there's supposed to be a meeting of the EPA's Hypoxia Task Force later this year, but with all of the federal changes, its members might not have the bandwidth to assess whether reduction goals are being met.
'That's all tentative at this point,' he said.
An EPA spokesperson said in an email that the agency 'takes this initiative very seriously' and will continue its progress. They did not respond to specific questions over staffing capacity and funding resources.
NOAA's communications staff declined to comment on staffing capacity, saying it 'remains dedicated to providing timely information, research and resources.'
Several federal task force positions remain vacant as of June 12, with only 'TBD' listed on the EPA's website for spots reserved for its own representatives, the Geological Survey, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies.
NOAA predicts the size of the dead zone at the beginning of the summer using an aggregate of models from various partner universities, including LSU and the University of Michigan. The agency will monitor and survey the dead zone throughout the summer and review its estimates against the size of the actual dead zone in August.
'It's about human behavior. There's both a watershed issue and a global climate change issue here,' Turner said.
Turner and Rabalais agreed the problem isn't with the EPA's plan but a need for greater efforts to reduce nitrogen runoff upstream. Solutions such as cover crops and crop rotation strategies help farmers keep fertilizer in their soil for better plant growth and reduce hypoxia-causing runoff.
'Every place is going to be a little different, but there are ways to reduce this,' Turner said.
Whether funding will continue to support these programs is unknown. Aside from some Inflation Reduction Act money and funds from previous federal farm bills, financial support for nutrient reduction has been 'modest,' Daigle said.
'There's a lot of questions about what's going to happen,' he added.
This upstream uncertainty affects industries that depend on the Gulf, such as commercial seafood harvesting, according to Daigle.
'They're under a lot of stress' from hurricanes and the influx of cheap, foreign shrimp saturating the market, he said. Reducing the hypoxic zone before it becomes the final nail in the coffin for shrimping in the Gulf is part of the Task Force's plan, and now is the time to drive home these reduction strategies, Daigle said
'The idea was that you wouldn't wait for that to happen. You start reducing the loading, you reverse the trend,' he said.
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This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
