North Carolina's 220,000 acres of salt marshes face multiple threats to their major roles in climate protection and ecosystem health, from rising seas and salt water intrusion, to more frequent and intense storms.

To combat the challenges, the North Carolina Coastal Federation has released a five-year action plan, focused on protecting and restoring the habitat.

Jacob Boyd, salt marsh program director for the federation, said it is urgent to address ways to ensure the salt marshes are here for the next generation.

"The ecosystem and community resilience and climate change really go hand in hand," Boyd explained. "Because if we can protect and conserve some of these salt marshes and make those ecosystems more resilient, that's going to have those resilience impacts and benefits to the local communities, for flood protection and all the other benefits that salt marshes provide."

The plan outlined several preservation strategies, including promoting living shorelines instead of bulkheads, restoring marsh elevations and sediments and conservation efforts to allow for marsh migration. The plan is part of the larger South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative, an effort spanning the coastline from North Carolina to Northern Florida, aiming to preserve and enhance more than 1 million salt marsh acres.

Sarah Spiegler, coastal resilience specialist for the North Carolina State Center for Marine Sciences and Technology, highlighted the plan's role in fostering collaboration among a variety of organizations, governments and academia. She noted the "all-hands-on-deck" approach should help to address the environmental, social and economic challenges related to salt marshes.

"Salt marshes and issues like climate change, they don't fall within one jurisdiction or they don't stop at the county line, or they don't fall into just one agency's purview," Spiegler emphasized. "The fact that we are going to have all of these agencies and partners working together, we're just very fortunate here in North Carolina to put all of our heads together."

Spiegler pointed out the efforts build on others in the state, including Gov. Roy Cooper's Executive Order 80 and the state's 2020 Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan.

She added the efforts will help bridge the gap between ecosystem resilience and community resilience in the face of climate change.


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West Virginia will receive $140 million to clean up legacy pollution in regions decimated by decades of coal mining.

The money is part of $725 million in Abandoned Mine Land funding that the Biden Administration is providing to more than two dozen states.

According to state data, more than 150 years of coal mining has left thousands of mines abandoned for decades.

In addition to restoring the natural landscape, reducing the odds of landslides and improving drinking water, repurposing old mine land can bolster local economies, but first they have to be cleaned up, said Eric Dixon, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, "making them places that everyday people can enjoy without fear of some hazard, like an abandoned mineshaft or an unreclaimed strip mine."

The funding is the third in a series of federal investments in abandoned mine land funding allowed through the bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by Congress in 2021.

Dixon said advocates are pushing for good-paying, family-sustaining jobs created by the expansion of reclamation work.

"The Biden administration has called for these remediation jobs to be good-quality union jobs," he said. "We've started to see some of the first union contracts awarded in states like Kentucky and Ohio, and that's extremely encouraging."

He said state agencies will funnel the money into projects that close dangerous mine shafts, reclaim unstable slopes and improve water quality by treating acid mine drainage.

"Those agencies, they'll identify those projects, they'll design reclamation projects," he said, "and then they'll actually bid out that reclamation contract to a construction contractor who will execute the work."

According to the group Appalachian Voices, mountaintop removal mining has destroyed an estimated one million acres in Central and Southern Appalachia.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule any day now on two cases that could allow judges to more easily overrule federal agencies, which could have big implications for environmental, consumer and public health protections.

The two cases -- Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. the Department of Commerce -- aim to overturn the 1984 Chevron deference doctrine that said when ambiguous statutes are being challenged in court, judges must defer to the reasonable interpretation of agency experts.

"It would give judges a lot more power to write very impactful regulatory provisions where those judges really don't have a lot of expertise," said Jim Murphy, the National Wildlife Federation's director of legal advocacy.

Opponents of the Chevron deference doctrine have said it gives too much power to the executive branch. The cases stem from a dispute where fishing crews are challenging requirements that they pay to have a monitor onboard to guard against overfishing and bycatch of endangered species.

If the Supreme Court invalidates the Chevron deference doctrine, Murphy said, it would undermine the work of dozens of agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

"The people who are charged with protecting our public health and protecting our natural resources are not going to have the tools they need," he said, "and it's going to result in people getting sick, people dying, places getting polluted. It's going to have real impact for a very long time."

The Supreme Court generally releases its decisions in mid-June before going into recess for the summer.

Kentucky will receive $74 million to clean up legacy pollution in regions decimated by decades of coal mining. The money is part of $725 million in abandoned mine land funding the Biden Administration is providing to more than two dozen states.

Kentucky has a backlog of sites. Research shows around 408,000 residents live within one mile of land with an abandoned mine.

Eric Dixon, senior researcher for the Ohio River Valley Institute, said in addition to restoring the natural landscape, reducing the odds of landslides and improving drinking water, repurposing old mine land can bolster local economies but first, the sites have to be cleaned up.

"Making them places that everyday people can enjoy without fear of some hazard, like an abandoned mine shaft or an unreclaimed strip mine," Dixon explained.

The latest round of funding was the third in a series of federal investments in abandon mine land reclamation allocated through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Dixon added advocates are pushing for good paying, family-sustaining jobs created by the expansion of
reclamation work.

"The Biden administration has called for these remediation jobs to be good quality union jobs," Dixon pointed out. "We've started to see some of the first union contracts awarded, and states like Kentucky and Ohio. And that's extremely encouraging."

He added state agencies will funnel the money into projects to close dangerous mine shafts, reclaim unstable slopes and improve water quality by treating acid mine drainage.

"Those agencies, they'll identify those projects, they'll design reclamation projects," Dixon outlined. "Then they'll actually bid out that reclamation contract to a construction contractor who will execute the work."

According to the group Appalachian Voices, mountaintop removal mining has destroyed an estimated 1 million acres in Central and Southern Appalachia.