The Guardian reports on a coalition of universities who have found hope for the low-lying, storm-prone (and tourism-dependent) Sunshine State, if climate resilience plans are put in place now:
One key element, an 18m-acre swath of protected land called the Florida wildlife corridor, is already mostly in place, and will spearhead Florida’s climate resilience if properly managed and allowed to evolve, the researchers believe.
“We are very blessed in Florida to have the opportunity to have a land conservation project as ambitious as the wildlife corridor, and right now a little over 30% of the state is permanently conserved,” said Joshua Daskin, conservation director of Archbold Biological Station, an ecological research non-profit that compiled the report in collaboration with five universities from Tallahassee to south Florida.
“Without decades of work by conservationists, by state agencies, by non-profits, by landowners, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to reap the benefits of resilience to fires, storms, floods and heat.”
The study makes a number of recommendations for the corridor, a private-public partnership finally approved by the Florida legislature in 2021 after years of planning, with a vision for a single, unrestricted wildlife passageway running hundreds of miles from the southern Everglades to the Alabama border.
Rich in flora and fauna, and home to almost all of Florida’s land-based imperiled species such as panthers, black bears and bald eagles, the corridor was designed to be primarily a conservation project, with little focus on climate resilience.
Yet the report notes that two-thirds of Florida’s floodplains, covering about 10m acres, are contained within the corridor, bringing potentially “billions of dollars’ worth of flood hazard protection” if they remain undeveloped.
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Success, the report concedes, will “require political will”, something not shown earlier this week when the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission agreed to surrender protections of the ecologically sensitive Split Oak Forest east of Orlando and allow a toll road to be built right through it.
Daskin, however, is confident there remains a common desire for conservation, noting that the corridor was established by the unanimous consent of a Florida legislature mindful of its future benefits.