Building Resilience through Collaborative Management of Coastal Protection and Restoration Planning in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, USA

Scott A Hemmerling,Tim J B Carruthers,Christine A Demyers

doi:10.3390/su14052974

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a collaborative planning process to develop an integrated coastal restoration plan for Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana that recognizes the knowledge, experience, and priorities of residents and local stakeholders. To achieve this goal, the research team convened a broad group of stakeholders who live and work in Plaquemines Parish, including representatives of the seafood, navigation, and oil and gas industries, as well as residents, landowners, and those who are indigenous to the region, all of whom rely upon the ecosystem services provided by the wetlands, bays, and waterways for sustenance and wellbeing. Using a combination of local knowledge mapping and participatory modeling, the group worked with scientists to develop a restoration plan consisting of a suite of interlinked natural and nature-based solutions. The approach was intentionally interactive and iterative, creating a venue for open dialogue between residents, scientists, and resource users where no one source of knowledge was given primacy over another. Residents were able to contribute information regarding coastal restoration planning within their own communities, and a consensus plan for prioritizing restoration efforts in clusters was submitted for consideration as part of the State of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan process. Providing local stakeholders with direct access to scientists allowed their local knowledge to be translated into data products that could be more readily ingested into numerical models and other scientific planning tools.

Highlights

This paper summarizes the methodological approaches used to co-develop this integrated coastal restoration plan and reviews the degree to which the plan can improve the resilience of Plaquemines Parish in four sections
The final output of this project was a co-developed integrated coastal restoration plan for Lower Plaquemines Parish that was submitted to the State of Louisiana for consideration, to be modeled as part of the state’s 2023 Coastal Master Plan
The integrated programmatic approach to coastal protection and restoration co-developed through this process represents the vision of a broad group of stakeholders who live and work in communities throughout Plaquemines Parish, many of whom rely upon the ecosystem services provided by the landscape of the region for sustenance and wellbeing

Summary

Introduction

The epistemological gap that exists between technical knowledge and local knowledge has reinforced, for many coastal residents, a fundamental distrust of government at all levels. This distrust often extends to the government-funded science that underpins much of coastal management, when that science contradicts the residents’ direct experience and knowledge of their local environment [3]. When residents are not actively engaged in coastal research, distrust can develop into knowledge controversies, wherein the claims of scientists and the policy practices of the government agencies that they inform become subject to public interrogation and dispute [5]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion