The wetlands will defend Baltimore from floods and storm surges

With a major restoration project, Baltimore wants to bring back to health more than 200 thousand square meters of wetlands along 18 km of coastline.

• Baltimore City, particularly its coastal neighborhoods, is exposed to flooding and storm surge.
• Wetlands, such as swamps, marshes and peat bogs, act as natural barriers against extreme weather events.
• For this reason, a plan to restore 200 thousand square meters of wetlands has begun.

The area south of Baltimore, the largest city in the US state of Maryland, has been completely reshaped by decades of urban and industrial development.Particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, where the Patapsco River.It is an area that in recent years has found itself suffering the consequences of extreme weather events, in particular floods and storm surges.To defend it, it is not necessary to build cumbersome and complex infrastructures.The path chosen is different: invest in restoration of wetlands.

The ecosystem value of wetlands

With the expression wetlands refers to all those territories in which land and water coexist:swamps, marshes, ponds, peat bogs, basins with brackish, fresh or salt water.When they are in good condition, these ecosystems - with their vegetation - safeguard the coasts from erosion and act as natural barriers against extreme weather events, made increasingly intense and frequent by global warming.At the same time, they guard a very rich biodiversity.Those in Baltimore, in particular, are home to pollinating insects and small fish.

These ecosystems, however, are very fragile in the face of the many threats triggered by man, such as pollution due to agriculture and industrial and civil waste or, again, the advent of invasive alien species, the exploitation of the soil and resources. Over the past three centuries, half of the wetlands in Europe, China and the United States are gone destroyed.

Restoration projects in Baltimore

For this reason, a massive one got underway in Baltimore wetland restoration project, called the Middle branch resilience initiative.The goal is to bring back to health over 200 thousand square meters of habitat along 18 kilometers of coast south of Baltimore.We start with the first 40 thousand m2, to be restored by the end of 2025:only for this first project, called Hanover street, were they allocated 11.5 million dollars.Money that is to be understood as an investment rather than a cost.The wetlands, in fact, will be reinforced with new vegetative embankments that will protect the 19 coastal neighborhoods at the center of a large redevelopment program worth 200 million dollars from storm surges.

As the magazine Inside climate news explains, who dedicates a long reportage to the topic, the outgoing administration led by Joe Biden has given billions of dollars to federal and state agencies to include the nature-based solutions in infrastructure planning and development.In September 2023 the White House also published the first National plan for climate resilience.