MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. -- North Carolina's Marine Fisheries Commission has approved an updated version of the state's Coastal Habitat Protection Plan, which experts say will improve the health of the state's wetlands and estuaries, and increase communities' resilience to climate change.

Leda Cunningham, officer for conserving marine life in the United States at The Pew Charitable Trusts, explained the plan includes new guidelines aimed at protecting seagrass, which filter out pollutants, improve water quality and help communities withstand increasing flood and sea-level rise from climate change by strengthening shorelines.

"I think it's really important for the public to understand that a healthy coastal environment can contribute to healthier coastal communities," Cunningham asserted.

The updated plan also includes information on how residents can design local projects and solutions to protect their estuaries.

Cunningham pointed to the Neuse River Basin as an example, and said communities could identify where additional vegetation could be planted along stream beds to help absorb and slow stormwater runoff and reduce algae blooms.

The plan also is in line with Gov. Roy Cooper's 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, which addressed the need to increase the resiliency of regions devastated by hurricanes.

Anne Deaton, habitat program supervisor of the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, said the state's valuable fisheries depend on the actions outlined in the updated plan.

"So if we are successful in implementation actions, it will improve our water quality, which will improve our habitat," Deaton explained. "That improves things like tourism, water-skiing and swimming, harvesting shellfish. It also increases the resilience of the coast when we have storms."

Cunningham emphasized she is excited about the plan's recommendation to forge a public-private partnership to maximize the interest and commitment of residents who want local solutions. She added many of the recommendations already are happening in coastal communities, and noted the state will begin working on water-quality rule-making recommendations next year.

"They're going to hit the ground running in January," Cunningham remarked. "That's going to take really pulling together between the environmental management commission, DEQ staff -- especially the division of water resources -- and this new public-private partnership that needs to get formed quickly and move things along."

According to the Department of Environmental Quality, the state has received more than 1,200 signatures from North Carolinians endorsing the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan.

Support for this reporting was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

By Bryce Oates for The Daily Yonder. Broadcast version by Chance Dorland for North Carolina News Service, reporting for The Daily Yonder-Public News Service Collaboration.

In Western North Carolina's Nantahala-Pisgah National Forest, a committed group of outdoor recreation enthusiasts, conservationists, hunting and fishing groups, forest product businesses and forest ecology advocates has been working closely with the U.S. Forest Service for years to update the agency's regional forest management plan.

But the Nantahala Pisgah Forest Partnership now is formally objecting to the plan the agency issued earlier this year, saying that the plan will lead to "more conflict and less collaboration" in several categories.

"One of our main objections is that the plan doesn't abide by the collaborative goals we set for progress toward ecological, social and economic sustainability," said Hugh Irwin, a Partnership participant and Landscape Conservation Planner for The Wilderness Society, in an interview with the Daily Yonder. "This group has been working together for years to avoid potential conflicts between harvest, old-growth, recreational goals, the needs of wildlife and carbon storage in forests."

The USFS plan expands timber harvest into more than 100,000 acres of known old-growth, state-recognized Natural Heritage Natural Areas, and largely undeveloped, inaccessible wilderness tracts, Irwin and other conservationists stated in official comments on the plan as part of a formal objection.

The Partnership's alternative, which included consensus agreement from timber harvesters and loggers, would have protected those same areas from logging and development.

In many cases, these forest collaboratives like the Nantahala-Pisgah Forest Partnership have successfully prevented potential conflicts in rural communities between the timber industry, environmental advocates, public land employees and a growing rural outdoor-recreation economy.

Irwin said that input into the planning process generated more than 14,000 public comments, among the largest response rates ever for a forest management issue in the eastern United States. "The Nantahala-Pisgah is at the heart of the Southern Appalachians in a lot of ways. It's the center of the Southern Blue Ridge area of the region. It represents some of the most consolidated areas of National Forest and ownership in the East, and is also adjacent to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, another center of public lands and biodiversity," Irwin said, explaining why so many citizens commented on the plan.

Among the most critical objections to the agency's plan is the role of old-growth forests in storing carbon as a means of climate-change mitigation. "There is an explicit link between old-growth and carbon storage, between old-growth and adapting to climate change. One of the major ways we have carbon stored on the landscape is through our forests. When you do scientific carbon modeling, it's obvious that there are many, many times more carbon stored in mature and old-growth forests than there are in young forest," Irwin said.

Old-growth forest protection and management issues on federal lands are likely to see increasing attention in the coming months. On Earth Day, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order on Strengthening the Nation's Forests, Communities, and Local Economies, committing to conserve and restore forests, including old-growth forests, their assessment and cataloging, and the analysis of mature and old-growth forest contributions to climate change protections.

Old-growth forest advocates largely cheered the White House order and attention to the issue.

"Just to hear the words 'old-growth forests' come out of the mouth of the President of the United States is a big thrill for us," said Dr. Joan Maloof, executive director and fdounder of the Old Growth Forest Network, in an email to Daily Yonder.

"Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is an important step in what we hope will be an eventual moratorium on any logging of old-growth forests from our federal forests. With their large trees, complex biodiversity and rich soils, these are the most crucial forests for carbon storage and they should be left untouched by the impacts of logging."

OGFN, along with 135 climate and natural resource experts, recently sent a letter making the case for federal old-growth forest protections. "There are so many reasons to protect our nation's oldest forests, from climate to biodiversity to beauty, we have been saying this for years, and we are thrilled to be making political progress toward this. It is a great Earth Day to celebrate, indeed," Maloof said.

Some climate-action advocates were not pleased with Biden's Earth Day actions.

"The Administration had a real opportunity to show leadership on Earth Day this year and failed miserably," said Jim Walsh, policy director of Food and Water Watch. "We will never offset our fossil-fuel usage by planting more trees. What we need to do is actually get to the root of the problem, and the major sources of emissions are coming from our energy and transportation systems. We've got to stop burning fossil fuels."

Walsh added that additional reductions in climate emissions can be had in the agricultural sector. "Factory farming is continuing to grow and thrive, producing significant amounts of greenhouse gases through giant livestock operations and massive fertilizer usage. We simply cannot phase out fossil fuels or cut agricultural pollution while the administration continues to pump billions of dollars in subsidies [to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture]. . . while ignoring the real work that needs to be done to address the climate crisis," Walsh said.

Back in North Carolina, Irwin hopes that the renewed attention to old-growth forest issues at the federal level can help to both address climate change and support needed management improvements to the local Nantahala-Pisgah forest region.

"I'm really excited about the president's order," Irwin said. "This is the most obvious climate mitigation we should be doing in our public forests - saving the existing old-growth, but also preserving the existing forests that are in great shape that could become old growth in the future."

A newly created map reveals more Americans are being exposed to health threats from proximity to oil-and-gas production facilities. The map's release Tuesday comes ahead of new industry safeguards expected from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Map co-creator Alan Septoff with the group Earthworks said more than 144,000 New Mexicans live within a "threat radius" of an oil or gas facility - defined as being a half-mile. Since the group's first nationwide analysis in 2017, Septoff said, millions more people have been added to the threat radius map.

"Seventeen-point-three million people live within the threat radius - up 4.7 million from five years ago," he said. "Almost 4 million kids under 18 live within the threat radius; 3.2 million students go to school at 12,400 schools."

New safeguards being considered by the EPA would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and associated toxic air pollution from new and existing oil-and-gas facilities and address routine flaring. The gases from extraction are known to increase rates of cancer, asthma and other diseases.

Earthworks' Andrew Klooster is an optical gas imaging thermographer based in Colorado, a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. Nonetheless, he said, what's written on paper and what's happening on the ground do not align - because the state doesn't have the capacity to enforce its regulations.

"In all the states that we work, whether it's Colorado or Texas," he said, "sites are not being inspected frequently enough and regulations are not being enforced as forcefully as they should be."

Despite a new reporting program implemented by the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division, quarterly reports show 262 operators did not file information about how much natural gas was lost to venting and flaring. Klooster said that's why new oil-and-gas development is making the problem worse.

"The industry, by and large, is still policing itself when it comes to air-quality violations," he said, "and there's a presumption on the part of regulators that they're voluntarily complying with most of the rules that have been adopted. The result of this presumption is pollution that continues to harm communities in all of the states that we work."

Connecticut is celebrating its first estuary reserve, which will help identify environmental threats to waterways and natural resources.

Connecticut's first National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) designates more than 50,000 acres of Long Island Sound, adjacent marshes and upland areas for research on climate resiliency, water quality and fish and wildlife habitats.

Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, has been a strong advocate for the reserve and said it can be a catalyst for critical conservation activity.

"The research that sheds light on the strategies within the NERR for things like climate resilience and mitigation will not only benefit the species -- things like bluefish, saltmarsh sparrow, semipalmated sandpiper, within the NERR -- but will also benefit them wherever they occur, the habitat and the species," Comins outlined.

Nearly 50 species listed under the Connecticut Endangered Species Act can be found within the reserve.

Saturday's designation ceremony is invitation-only and will take place at 11 a.m. on the University of Connecticut's Avery Point campus, which will be the research reserve's headquarters. The reserve receives funding from the state and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Roughly $1 million per year will be earmarked for the reserve.

Kevin O'Brien, supervising environmental analyst for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said the reserve's educational component for local schools is also key, adding it will help foster environmental stewardship.

"As you're collecting information on changes in water temperature or water quality, opportunities for educational programs to get students to the reserve to work with that data to understand what some of the data might suggest about what the estuary's health is," O'Brien explained.

The research reserve is the country's 30th. Speakers at Saturday's event will include national and state government leaders, representatives from The University of Connecticut and others. After the ceremony, guests will be invited to join a boat tour of a section of the reserve.