Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: A Transformational Opportunity for Habitats

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: A Transformational Opportunity for Habitats

00:00:00 (Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo)
Climate change is having a direct, significant, negative impact on the ocean.

00:00:07 (John Sheehan)
This is Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo back in June.

00:00:10 (Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo)
Wetlands and marshes are becoming inundated which breaks down nature’s defenses of things like severe storms, flooding, and hurricanes.

00:00:18 (Doctor Rick Spinrad)
As you’ll hear in a moment, the bipartisan infrastructure bill provides NOAA with a historic opportunity.

00:00:24 (John Sheehan)
And that’s NOAA Administrator Doctor Rick Spinrad.

00:00:26 (Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo)
So, today I’m so proud to announce a nearly three billion dollar investment to get us ready, to prepare, to help communities be more resilient, to make transformational investments.

00:00:37 (John Sheehan)
They were announcing historic coastal and climate resilience funding for NOAA, made possible by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to take action over five years in the areas of habitat restoration, coastal resilience, and weather forecasting infrastructure. It was a mammoth spending bill. And it has big implications for NOAA Fisheries and the work the agency conducts. This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. I’m John Sheehan. And today we’re going to concentrate on the opportunities created by the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill for habitat restoration.

00:01:13 (Carrie Robinson)
Our nation’s fisheries rely on healthy habitat. You can’t have a healthy fishery, you can’t have a sustainable fishery unless the habitat that they rely on is healthy.

00:01:23 (John Sheehan)
This is my guest, Carrie Robinson, the Director of NOAA Fisheries Office of Habitat Conservation, which will be using the new funding to launch restoration projects all over the country.

00:01:33 (Carrie Robinson)
West Coast, Alaska, Hawaii, Gulf Coast, East Coast, Great Lakes, Caribbean. We’re doing work in all of those places.

00:01:42 (John Sheehan)
So, what does habitat restoration involve?

00:01:43 (Carrie Robinson)
Things like opening up streams that might have barriers in them that would block a fish from going upstream to their spawning habitat. We do large scale habitat restoration of like, a marsh, or a wetland. We do quite a bit of coral restoration.

00:02:01 (John Sheehan)
We’ll also talk about the funding opportunities that are available right now, millions of dollars on the table awaiting proposals, with special provisions setting aside funds for underserved communities and tribes. Stick around to learn more. Carrie Robinson, welcome to Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. Thanks so much.

00:02:19 (Carrie Robinson)
Thank you. It’s good to be here.

00:02:20 (John Sheehan)
So, what does it mean to have healthy, restored habitats? What are the benefits?

00:02:25 (Carrie Robinson)
So, as many of our listeners know, the National Marine Fisheries Service has responsibilities to manage our nation’s fisheries. Those fisheries will not be healthy fisheries, will not be sustainable fisheries, will not be as productive as we all want them to be without healthy habitat. Some fish rely on a marsh as a nursery area. That’s where the little fish are before they become big fish and go out into the ocean. So, we need to make sure that there’s enough marsh habitat. And we need to make sure that that marsh habitat’s healthy so that we can make sure that our fisheries are as productive as possible. We also care a lot about recovering endangered species. And for a lot of these species, habitat is the key to recovery. Healthy habitat is the key to recovery. So, we’re studying where those species need more of certain kind of habitat, need more access to a certain kind of habitat, or need that habitat to be healthier and better functioning.

00:03:25
And that helps towards our recovery and ultimately removing them from the Endangered Species List.

00:03:31 (John Sheehan)
And species that aren’t endangered that just need healthy habitat to grow. You’re not going to get delicious oysters without the clean estuary.

00:03:40 (Carrie Robinson)
Absolutely. And a lot of times that’s where the protection aspect of my offices’ work comes in. So, how can we protect habitat so that we don’t have to restore it someday? What kinds of work that we need to do to make sure that we maintain healthy habitats for all of these species?

00:03:59 (John Sheehan)
One of the things that your office is responsible for is creating resilient coastal communities. What does that mean?

00:04:06 (Carrie Robinson)
Yeah so, we look at both resilient coastal communities, but also resilient coastal ecosystems. So, we know that healthy habitat not only benefit fish, but also benefit communities. So, you might make a community more resilient to potential flooding due to climate change. A lot of our coastal communities and coastal ecosystems are at greater risk. So, our habitat restoration projects have multiple benefits. They have benefits for those fish. But they also have benefits to address hurricanes coming through and trying to minimize the impact on those coastal communities, protect that coastal infrastructure.

00:04:51 (John Sheehan)
And certainly, certain coastal communities are more at risk than others. But it seems like every coast is going to be under some kind of climate change risk.

00:05:04 (Carrie Robinson)
Yes. So, you know, we look at how vulnerable are various habitats to climate change. And then we can focus on those places where there is more vulnerability, or where a particular species of fish is more vulnerable to climate change, and we really want to protect that habitat that they rely on. We also, when we’re thinking about climate change, want to make sure that our habitat restoration projects are built to last, and built with climate change in mind. So, if we know sea level rise is happening at a particular rate, we can design our large scale habitat restoration projects taking that into account so that thirty years from now that habitat restoration project is still functioning and still providing healthy habitat for the species that we care about.

00:05:52 (John Sheehan)
Could you paint a picture for me of kind of what that looks like? What does it mean to restore a marsh and make it climate resistant?

00:06:01 (Carrie Robinson)
Yes. One of the projects I want to talk about is out in Oregon. It’s called our Southern Flow Corridor Project. And this is in Tillamook County near Tillamook Bay on the coast of Oregon. We worked with our partners to remove old levies, old tide gates, a lot of man-made structures in this tidal estuary. And those man-made structures were having an impact on important habitat for salmon. And they also were leading to a lot of flooding problems for this coastal community. So, what we did was removed a lot of those man-made structures and we reconnected over four hundred acres of marsh habitat and opened up thirteen miles of tidal channels. So, what that means is that instead of little bits of patches of habitat that weren’t connected to each other, we got all of that connected so that salmon had access to it.

00:07:08
We opened up greater flow in this corridor, allowing flood waters to move more freely over four thousand acres around this whole project site show reductions in flood levels. So, it’s a huge area. Not just the area that we focused on for salmon habitat, but the surrounding area and the surrounding coastal community had less of a flood risk.

00:07:34 (John Sheehan)
Yeah so, you’re helping an endangered species while also helping the community around it which was apparently suffering from a lot of flooding.

00:07:42 (Carrie Robinson)
Absolutely, win-win. Different partners were working together with different primary goals. But the project addressed all of those goals. So, there’s certain partners that really came in really thinking about flooding reduction. Like another federal agency FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They were really focused on reducing flooding. Whereas certain estuary partnerships in Tillamook County are really focused on the salmon.

00:08:09 (John Sheehan)
And so, your office was sort of the organizing body that coordinated these efforts.

00:08:15 (Carrie Robinson)
Yes, I think all of the partners came together and we provided a couple of things. We did provide funding for this project. We also provided what we call technical assistance. And really what that means is our people. Our people in Oregon are working with these coastal communities helping them get through the permitting process, making sure that we’re providing good engineering support, and biologists to make sure that this project is well-built and is going to serve the purposes that we want it to.

00:08:50 (John Sheehan)
And what’s another illustrative example?

00:08:53 (Carrie Robinson)
Another example that I’d love to share with you is actually in Maryland. So, we’re going to go to the opposite coast and talk a little bit about the Bloede Dam. The Bloede Dam was removed in 2018. And it was one of our largest and most complex dam removal projects around the country. And this was to make sure that key species like Blueback Herring, Alewife, American Shad, American Eel, and a lot of these shad river herring species could reconnect to almost sixty five miles of habitat that they had been blocked from in the past because of this dam. Another benefit to this local community, we talk about aging infrastructure in our country, this dam had become a major safety hazard.

00:09:45
It was no longer serving its original purpose. So, not only do we benefit fish, we also benefitted this local community by taking out a safety hazard.

00:09:55 (John Sheehan)
Yeah, that sounds kind of like the case in both of your examples: that there are this sort of crumbling infrastructure that was both a hazard to people and to the habitat, and a lot of your job was just clearing that out.

00:10:07 (Carrie Robinson)
Absolutely, absolutely.

00:10:10 (John Sheehan)
Speaking of infrastructure, recently announced thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill a large chunk of money is coming NOAA’s way with a good amount of it going toward fisheries, and towards habitat. Janet Coit, the assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries described it as a “once in a generation opportunity to invest in habitat restoration.”

00:10:30 (Carrie Robinson)
This new funding provides critical support for our nation’s fisheries, and for protected resources. As well, it strengthens the resilience of coastal communities and ecosystems. And it helps them mitigate, persist, and thrive in the face of many stresses.

00:10:45 (John Sheehan)
Why is it once in a generation?

00:10:47 (Carrie Robinson)
Well, we are so grateful, and so excited about this opportunity. So, across NOAA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes over three billion dollars of funding towards all different kinds of activities. But I want to talk to you a little bit about the habitat provisions. There will be hundreds of millions of dollars going towards all different kinds of habitat restoration projects. So, some of the things we’ve already been talking about today, we’re just going to get to do a lot more of that. And so that’s really why it’s once in a generation is just the resources that we’re going to be able to put toward these projects.

00:11:28 (John Sheehan)
Could you give me a sense of the scale of it? Take, for example the case in Oregon, or in Maryland. Will these future projects look like that? Will they be bigger, much more ambitious in scale?

00:11:41 (Carrie Robinson)
Some will be bigger. And the other way we’re thinking about the larger scope and scale is we’re going to get to have more of those projects. People who work on my team are in over thirty locations across our country in these coastal areas where these projects are happening. And all of them have their bucket list of habitat restoration projects they’ve always wanted to do. And now we have an opportunity to fund more of them than we’ve ever been able to fund before.

00:12:13 (John Sheehan)
Can you give me some examples?

00:12:14 (Carrie Robinson)
Sure. So, the Infrastructure Act has two provisions that we’re really focused on. One is transformational habitat restoration projects around the country. That will be things like we talked about out in Oregon, the Southern Flow Corridor Project. But it will also include we’re hoping to see projects come in from Alaska, and Hawaii, and California, and all those kinds of projects: wetland restoration projects all over the country. There’s another provision that’s focused on fish passage. So, we talked a little bit earlier about the project on Bloede Dam. That’s what I mean by fish passage projects. We have them all over the country. We’ve never had such an emphasis though on fish passage. So, it’s a separate funding opportunity just for fish passage. And we’re going to be looking for all kinds of we call them barrier removal projects.

00:13:09
So, it’s not just a dam but any kind of barrier in a stream that’s preventing a fish from going upstream. We’re looking to fund projects like that. And we know that projects have looking for funding in the great lakes, in New England, in the Southeast, all along the West Coast. So, we’re excited to see what kind of projects our partners bring.

00:13:29 (John Sheehan)
Yeah. And I think salmon gets a lot of the maybe attention in those cases. But it’s not just salmon. There’s a lot of, a lot of other species that, that need the attention.

00:13:40 (Carrie Robinson)
Absolutely. So, we do anticipate funding some great salmon projects on the West Coast, and even some Atlantic Salmon projects up in Maine. But we’re looking to fund projects for lots of different kinds of species. So, we’re looking a lot of these species are what we call anadromous species, meaning they go up a river, up a stream, and they don’t just stay in the ocean. So, those barriers preventing them from accessing habitat that they need to spawn, it’s really important that we open that up and restore the health of that habitat so that those species can thrive.

00:14:15 (John Sheehan)
And the law makes special mention of social equity and of making sure to create specific carve outs for underserved communities.

00:14:24 (Carrie Robinson)
Both underserved communities and tribes. So, for tribes Congress directed us in the fish passage provision, and the funding we’re getting for fish passage to carve out fifteen percent of those funds specifically for tribes. So, early on in this process we asked tribal leaders what was important to them. Loud and clear they told us that they need part of the budgets for these projects to be for their own capacity to do this work. So, that is something that they can build into their project proposals, and we will be funding through that funding opportunity. For underserved communities you’ll see an emphasis on underserved communities in all of our funding competitions. There is one funding competition that is explicitly focused on underserved communities. And it is to ensure that underserved communities can fully participate in developing habitat restoration projects that are important to their community.

00:15:27
So, everything that we’ve talked about, about funding work that restores healthy habitats for fish we are also looking at the benefits of making underserved communities more resilient to climate change, thinking about the resilience of coastal ecosystems and coastal communities and underserved communities. There also is an emphasis on underserved communities in our other funding competitions. So, for example, our habitat restoration transformational habitat restoration funding competition, we asked project applicants to tell us how are they going to engage underserved communities in the development of this habitat restoration project? How are they going to make sure that they are a part of the process that leads to the large project down the road? So, we’re asking them to include that in their applications for us.

00:16:25 (John Sheehan)
Which I think is pretty unique. That’s not usually something that goes into federal infrastructure planning.
00:16:31 (Carrie Robinson)
No, not at all. This is unique. And we’re really excited to try some things in this first year and see how they go. So, we’re going to be looking for feedback from our partners, from these entities in coastal communities. How did this funding competition go for you? And what kind of project proposals did we get? Who did we hear from? Who didn’t we hear from? We’re going to be looking for who didn’t we hear from to make sure that we increase our outreach to them in future years. One of the most important things to keep in mind about this infrastructure funding is it’s five year funding. We have our first funding opportunities out the door and they’re all open right now. But that is this year. Next year we’ll have more funding competitions, and each year for the next five years. So, we’re going to learn from what happens in year one and build upon that learning for the future years.

00:17:23 (John Sheehan)
And can we talk a little bit more about what an underserved community looks like? It’s easy to sort of compare to what maybe your specific region of the country looks like, but we could be talking about anything from a small village in Alaska, to a fishing community in Hawaii, to somewhere on the Gulf that is repeatedly flooding. I mean, there’s so many opportunities for this money to go.

00:17:46 (Carrie Robinson)
Yeah so, we are asking people to we call it self-identify. So, you tell us if you think that you meet the definition of an underserved community. And the definition is quite broad. It refers to populations that have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in an aspect of economic, social, or civic life. So, there’s an executive order that the Biden Administration put out that talks about underserved communities. And we’re using that really broad definition. And that’s clearly outlined in the funding opportunities. But we’re asking people to share with us why they think they meet that definition, and why they think their community meets that definition. And it, as you said it can be an urban community, it can be a rural community. We know there are underserved communities along all of our coastlines.

00:18:42
And we’re looking forward to hearing from them about how this funding can help them restore habitat in their areas.

00:18:52 (John Sheehan)
As Carrie alluded to a minute ago, there are funding opportunities through the Office of Habitat Conservation right now, four of them in fact. Do you want to talk a little bit about the recently announced funding opportunities? You’re soliciting proposals right now for both fish passage and habitat restoration and coastal resilience projects.

00:19:11 (Carrie Robinson)
Absolutely. One is focused on fish passage more broadly. We’re looking for project proposals anywhere between one and fifteen million dollars. That deadline is the fifteenth of August. We also are looking for projects from tribes for fish passage anywhere between three hundred thousand and five million dollars. And that application period is open through the end of August. And then we’ve got transformational habitat restoration anywhere between one and fifteen million dollars. And that application is open through early September, September sixth. And finally, the underserved community habitat restoration. And that is for anywhere between seventy-five thousand dollars and a million dollars. And that one is open until the end of September. We wanted to give everyone a little bit longer for the word to get out to those coastal communities cause we’re really trying to reach new partners. So, they have until September thirtieth to submit those.

00:20:07 (John Sheehan)
Okay, that went by pretty quickly. But all of these funding opportunities are online at NOAA.gov/infrastructurelaw. You can just Google it. The page is a great resource and will be updated as projects open up millions of dollars.

00:20:21 (Carrie Robinson)
Millions of dollars.

00:20:24 (John Sheehan)
Right now. It’s so exciting.

00:20:25 (Carrie Robinson)
It is.

00:20:26 (John Sheehan)
Carrie Robinson, thanks so much.

00:20:27 (Carrie Robinson)
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

00:20:30 (John Sheehan)
Carrie Robinson is the Director of NOAA Fisheries Office of Habitat Conservation. I’m John Sheehan, and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.

00:20:41 (End of Podcast)