Since the gulf oil spill, conservationists have had their work cut out for them. Now, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is planning its gulf cleanup efforts for 2015.
The National Fish and Wildlife Federation is working on a budget for its latest round of money for this year’s Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund.
The Benefit Fund is similar to the RESTORE Act. Both rely on penalties paid by BP and other rig operators for the 2010 Gulf oil spill.
“In 2012, the department of justice announced a plea agreement that it had reached with BP that resolved certain criminal charges against the company after the Deepwater Horizon spill,” Tom Kelsch, Vice President of the Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund, explains. “A few months after that, the Department of Justice announced a similar deal with TransOcean.”
But that’s where things diverge.
“There’s a real focus on fish and wildlife and habitats,” says Florida Fish and Wildlife’s Gulf Restoration Coordinator Kelly Samek.
The funds going to the RESTORE act, on the other hand, are used to tackle the economic damage to the gulf coast.
This is the third year the NFWF is putting that funding to use. It goes away in another 2 years.
The organization says it made great strides in 2013 and 2014. Its projects focused on the conservation of plants, animals and habitats, which are referred to as “living resources.”
“The projects range from helping to protect and restore populations of shorebirds along the beaches, improving nesting success for sea turtles by addressing lake pollution, helping to restore oyster reef habitats, improving water quality in places like Pensacola Bay,” Kelsch says.
NFWF project manager Phil Coram says the plans for the year ahead will be continuations of those already stated.
“They are for the most part, projects that do monitoring out in the Gulf of Mexico to provide useful information on how to manage the resources in the future,” Coram says.
Florida Fish and Wildlife’s Kelly Samek says It’s not an easy strategy to plan for.
“You know, this has been a learning process for all of the parties involved. Something of this scale necessarily involves people who, you know, this isn’t necessarily their backyard, so we’re trying to do a lot of education effort for the decision-makers involved, whether it be at the federal agencies, or at the National Fish and Wildlife Federation, so we kind of want to identify what those areas are that we want to work on more,” Samek says.
And a lot can still happen in two years.
