By Adam Wagner for McClatchy News and The Raleigh News and Observer, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Raleigh News and Observer-Public News Service Collaboration

On a recent weekend, a family went fishing feet away from a salt marsh in the northwest corner of Carolina Beach State Park, about 20 minutes south of downtown Wilmington.

They were likely unaware that the grass just a few feet away is a potential tool in the state's fight against climate change, but one that could swiftly turn into a source of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases as sea levels rise.

There are about 220,000 acres of salt marsh on the North Carolina coast, a collection of grasses that live in the muddy zone frequently washed over by tides.

Right now, those marshes are holding about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide, according to researchers from Duke University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Each year, North Carolina's marshes capture the equivalent of an additional 250,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide - about as much greenhouse gas as 54,347 cars generate per year.

But as the world continues to warm and sea levels rise, salt marshes and seagrass are likely to drown or be washed away. As that happens, they will shift from being a tool in the fight against global warming, a so-called carbon sink, to their remains being a contributor to it, a source of carbon.

If sea levels rise 4 feet by 2100, researchers estimate that 134,000 acres of North Carolina's salt marsh will be lost to drowning or erosion by 2053 and 194,000 acres by 2073, Duke University and NOAA researchers included in a draft version of North Carolina's Coastal Habitat Protection Plan.

"In North Carolina, given expected sea level rise rates and current sedimentation rates and erosion rates, it looks like our salt marsh is not likely to be able to keep up," said Lydia Olander, the director of the Ecosystem Services Program at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

In addition to the carbon impact, losing salt marshes would lead to the loss of habitat for juvenile fish and have a detrimental impact on water quality by leading to a decreased stormwater buffer.

How salt marshes make great blue carbon habitats

For millennia, salt marshes have kept pace with rising sea levels.

The slow-moving growth of salt marshes is powered in part by tides, which carry sediment and plant leaves toward the shore where they can settle on the salt marsh's surface, Devon Eulie, a UNC-Wilmington professor of coastal processes and policy, wrote in an email.

Simultaneously, Eulie said, the plants that make up the salt marsh are growing, boosting the soil with their roots.

Because salt marshes work to keep up with sea level rise, the grasses are actually capable of increasing production in the face of danger, said Antonio Rodriguez, a coastal geologist at UNC-Chapel Hill's Institute of Marine Sciences. They capture more carbon, photosynthesizing it and growing more.

"It's intertidal and it builds soils relatively rapidly. That's what makes it such a great blue carbon habitat," Rodriguez said, referring to the process by which aquatic ecosystems capture and store the planet-warming greenhouse gas.

The fields of spiky grasses that make up salt marshes capture carbon from the atmosphere, photosynthesizing it and using it to boost themselves upwards, a millimeter-by-millimeter race to avoid being drowned by the encroaching sea. Marshes are generally capable of keeping up with slow-moving sea level rise, with the draft protection plan stating, "Coastal wetlands that can keep pace with sea level rise and not drown in place have a near limitless capacity to sequester carbon."

But, Rodriguez said, "When sea level rises too rapidly and the salt marsh can't keep up with that, then it reaches that tipping point. And then it's very stressed and the biomass goes down and it starts to collapse."

Once tides begin to chew away at the shoreline, Rodriguez added, they are washing older carbon out of the soil and into the open water where at least some of it is processed and ends up back in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a gas that plays a key function in heating the globe.

As sea level rise begins to threaten the marsh, Eulie wrote, the native cordgrasses and needlerushes could begin to die due to higher levels of saltwater flooding the marsh, potentially replaced by non-native grasses. The marsh will often begin to show signs of erosion, too, developing small cliffs on its edges.

"As the water gets deeper and floods the marsh more frequently, you have greater potential for that flow and any waves - from both wind and nearby vessel traffic - to physically erode the edge," Eulie wrote, adding that erosion is location-specific and can be complicated by other factors like dredging and historic ditching and draining to control mosquitoes.

Are NC marshes keeping up with rising sea levels?

Salt marshes can add soil beneath them at a maximum of about 12 millimeters per year, or about 3 feet, 11.24 inches over a hundred-year period. But that is only under perfect conditions, and many parts of the North Carolina coast could see that much sea level rise by 2100, according to the state's Climate Science Report.

As sea levels rise in the second half of this century, waves will erode the front edge of marshes and frequent inundation will begin to outpace marsh's ability to add soil, said Katie Warnell, an Ecosystem Services Program policy associate. As saltwater creeps upward and inward, freshwater wetlands and forests will transition to salt marsh and then, in many cases, to open water.

If sea levels rise 2 feet, research indicates that tides pushing inland could actually lead to the creation of more salt marsh than exists right now. But at higher levels of sea rise, the amount of lost marsh quickly begins to outpace the creation of new marsh.

"There's kind of this constant shift inward of salt marsh and then it starts to be lost as the water gets deeper in those areas," Warnell said.

The disappearing marsh will not be the only contributor of greenhouse gases, with the dying forest also sending carbon into the atmosphere.

On the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, about 15% of the forest changed into a ghost forest between 2001 and 2014, according to research from N.C. State University. The Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula is a collection of rural Eastern North counties running from Beaufort in the west to mainland Dare County in the east, with the Albemarle Sound making up the northern border and the Pamlico Sound the southern border.

When saltwater begins to infiltrate a ghost forest, trees begin to shed their bark and eventually bleach as they die, many still standing.

From his oyster lease in Westmouth Bay off the northern edge of Harkers Island, Ryan Bethea is about a half-mile away from Browns Island, an uninhabited clump of marsh and forest that sits between Harkers Island and Marshallberg.

The southern half of the island is a collection of gray now, saltwater bleaching what was once a forest. The only green remaining is on the northern side.

"The pines and stuff can't take the inundation of seawater so they essentially die," Bethea said. "We see that stuff, that's short-term. You can probably look at a picture (from) 15 years ago and see the difference."

The Coastal Habitat Protection Plan says it is important to protect the low-lying areas where salt marshes are likely to shift as sea levels rise. By 2026, the plan says, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality should work with local governments, nonprofits and scientists to conserve those corridors, protecting them from development.

Those efforts are, however, likely to come at a high price tag, said Braxton Davis, the director of North Carolina's Division of Coastal Management.

"What we probably need is a coastwide plan in North Carolina that really drives our funding decisions," Davis said, noting that such a document would help make the case for funding the purchase and protection of specific pathways.

Taking clean water and the environment for granted

Tracy Skrabal, an N.C. Coastal Federation senior scientist, sits in a skiff docked in Lees Cut, on the backside of Wrightsville Beach. Skrabal is floating in a part of the waterway between two clutches of salt marsh, a vast field of green grass on one side and mudflats sloping gradually upward to marsh and then onto a grove of trees on the other.

Just out of sight on either side is rampant coastal development, indicated by docks that have been built across marshes and bulkheads. As Skrabal speaks, the sounds of hammer strikes echo across the waterway, a new house going up on the backside of Wrightsville, its shoreline already bulkheaded.

Where the middle of Lees Cut is a vibrant coastal ecosystem, the backside of Wrightsville Beach is mostly a barren collection of different-colored bulkheads and docks with a few strings of marsh grass still hanging on amid the boat wakes and rebounding waves.

"I think folks in my generation and the generation before me just took it for granted as we take for granted clean water and the environment in general. I think it's only now that we're waking up to the true effects of climate change, sea level rise," Skrabal said. "We're starting to look for solutions and we're really realizing the incredible benefits that are provided to us, more or less free of charge by these coastal wetlands and the estuaries themselves."

When saltwater begins destroying a marsh, Skrabal said, it will look like somebody dumped pollution on the ecosystem. This is happening in "splotches" up and down the North Carolina coast, often starting on the marsh edges but sometimes in the middle of marshes that sit at lower elevations.

Skrabal said, "We need to do everything we can to protect them, to allow them to continue to grow and keep pace with sea level rise."

"If at some point we're able to start reducing sea level rise and start to reach an equilibrium, the coastal system will also reach an equilibrium and will stop drowning all this habitat which means the system could switch back to being a carbon sink eventually," Olander said. "It's losing all these habitats that is making this a carbon source."

Adam Wagner wrote this article for McClatchy News and The Raleigh News and Observer.


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Balancing the needs of the many with those who have traditionally reaped benefits from public lands is behind a new rule issued Thursday by the Bureau of Land Management.

A quarter-million acres of public lands, including 13 million in New Mexico, now fall under the Public Lands Rule. The BLM is charged with managing multiple uses but has historically prioritized extraction, such as oil and gas drilling, along with cattle grazing, over conservation and outdoor recreation.

Jesse Duebel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, believes the new rule is more fair-minded.

"I really feel like this new rule doesn't minimize those other things," Duebel asserted. "The other uses are still going to be allowed to continue but now, decisions are going to be made with conservation in the forefront. And of course, conservation by definition, is the 'wise use' of our natural resources."

The rule requires BLM managers to prioritize designating more "Areas of Critical Environmental Concern" in their land use planning. Right now the number is small, but they help protect cultural sites and wildlife habitat.

The rule also allows BLM managers to issue conservation leases to nonprofit and community organizations, including tribal communities, for landscape restoration work on public lands.

Keegan King, executive director of the Native Land Institute, believes in the face of climate change, the long-term health of public lands must be a priority.

"I'm a conservationist but I'm also a hunter, and it's important that we protect these places for a variety of different uses," King explained. "There are ranchers and other people that utilize federal lands and it's important that all of it is maintained for future generations."

According to the Commerce Department's 2022 Bureau of Economic Analysis data, outdoor recreation generated $2.4 billion in added value for New Mexico and created almost 28,000 jobs.

During the BLM's public process on the issue, more than 90% of comments were in favor of elevating conservation for a more balanced approach to public land management.

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


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By Max Graham for Grist.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete. 

On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change. 

The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: Plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”

A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant 1 million trees by 2030, recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort — a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat. 

But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees — and the rest of the country’s — didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too?

That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about one-fifth of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage. 

“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry — and Forest Service funding — with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami. 

“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.” 

There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts, I think, are moving us in a positive direction.”

Researchers say food forests are unlikely to produce enough food to feed everyone in need of it. But Schmitt-Harsh said they could help supplement diets, especially in neighborhoods that are far from grocery stores. “A lot has to go into the planning of where the food forest is, when the fruits are harvestable, and whether the harvestable fruits are equitably distributed.”

She pointed to the Philadelphia Orchard Project as an emblem of success. That nonprofit has partnered with schools, churches, public recreation centers, and urban farms to oversee some 68 community orchards across the city. Their network of orchards and food forests generated more than 11,000 pounds of fresh produce last year, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the nonprofit.

Some of the sites in Philadelphia have only three or four trees. Others have over 100, said Kim Jordan, the organization’s other executive director. “We’re doing a variety of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, pollinator plants, ground cover, perennial vegetables — a whole range of things,” Jordan said. 

The community food bank in Tucson started its project in 2021, when it bought six shade huts to shelter saplings. Each hut can house dozens of baby trees, which are grown in bags and irrigated until they become sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. Over the past three years, Merchant has partnered with a high school, a community farm, and the Tohono O’odham tribal nation to nurse, plant, and maintain the trees. So far they’ve only put a few dozen saplings in the ground, and Merchant aims to ramp up efforts with a few hundred more plantings this year. His initial goal, which he described as “lofty and ambitious,” is to plant 20,000 trees by 2030.

The food bank is also organizing workshops on growing, pruning, and harvesting, as well as courses on cooking with mesquite flour. And they’ve hosted community events, where people bring seed pods to pound into flour — a process that requires a big hammer mill that isn’t easy to use on your own, Merchant said. Those events feature a mesquite-pancake cook-off, using the fresh flour.

Merchant is drawing on a model of tree-planting that Lancaster, the urban forester, has been pioneering for 30 years in a downtown neighborhood called Dunbar Spring. That area was once as barren as much of southern Tucson, but a group of volunteers led by Lancaster — who started planting velvet mesquite and other native trees in 1996 — has built up an impressive canopy. Over three decades, neighborhood foresters have transformed Dunbar Spring’s bald curbsides into lush forests of mesquite, hackberry, cholla and prickly pear cactus, and more — all plants that have edible parts.

“There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert, so we tapped into that,” Lancaster said. “That’s what we focused our planting on.” 

The Dunbar Spring food forest is now what Lancaster calls a “living pantry.” He told Grist that up to a quarter of the food he eats — and half of what he feeds his Nigerian dwarf goats — is harvested from plants in the neighborhood’s forest. “Those percentages could be much more if I were putting more time into the harvests.” The more than 1,700 trees and shrubs planted by Lancaster’s group have also stored a ton of water — a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert — by slurping up an estimated 1 million gallons of rainwater that otherwise would have flowed off the pavement into storm drains.

Another well-established food forest skirts the Old West Church in Boston, where volunteers have spent a decade transforming a city lawn into a grove of apple, pear, and cherry trees hovering over vegetable, pollinator, and herb gardens. Their produce — ranging from tomatoes and eggplants to winter melons — gets donated to Women’s Lunch Place, a local shelter for women without permanent housing, according to Karen Spiller, a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of New Hampshire and a member of Old West Church who helps with the project. 

“It’s open for harvest at any time,” Spiller said. “It’s not, ‘Leave a dollar, and pick an apple.’ You can pick your apple, and eat your apple.”

Merchant wants to apply the same ethic in Tucson: mesquite pods for all to pick — and free pancakes after a day staying cool in the shade.


Max Graham wrote this article for Grist.


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Saving New Mexico residents money as they adapt to climate change is the goal behind an Earth Day event in Albuquerque Sunday.

The Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club has teamed up with partners to offer residents free energy savings plans.

Camilla Feibelman, director of the chapter, said the urgency of climate change is obvious in New Mexico after a decadelong drought followed by the state's largest wildfire ever in 2022. She explained the weekend event will focus on helping people develop a personal electrification plan and steps to get started.

"That might be getting credits or benefits for better insulating your home, or changing out your windows, or switching to an electric vehicle or moving to new, more energy-efficient appliances," Feibelman outlined.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act provides tax incentives to households and agencies to increase energy efficiency. The state of New Mexico has additional benefits available.

Sierra Club volunteers will serve as "energy guides" as they walk visitors through their options during Sunday's event from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Balloon Fiesta Park.

Feibelman acknowledged many people feel helpless about climate change but noted there are personal choices which can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And she stressed you don't have to be a homeowner to access benefits, because many are also available to renters.

"There are increasing benefits according to income, basically there's a benefit for anything you might want to do from water savings to energy savings, from transportation to the indoor air quality in your home," Feibelman emphasized.

Feibelman encouraged people interested in making a personal electrification plan to visit the state's Electrify New Mexico website for more information. She added those who cannot attend the Sunday event can still sign up for energy savings plans through the Sierra Club and receive contacts for local vendors, financing methods for upgrades and information about tax rebates.