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Наприкінці листопада Аксьонов заявив, що Крим цього року отримав 2,7 мільярда рублів за рахунок продажу «націоналізованого» майна
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President Joe Biden was in Angola Wednesday for a tour of Lobito port, the ocean terminal of a U.S.-backed railway redevelopment corridor. The president met with workers and spoke with leaders about what the president called the largest U.S. investment in a train project outside America. VOA’s Anita Powell traveled with the president and has this report. Mayra Fernandes contributed to this report. (Produced by: Rod James)
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State Department — The United States has dismissed Chinese objections to Taiwan President Lai Ching-te’s stopovers in Hawaii and Guam during a Pacific tour, reaffirming that transits through the U.S. by Taiwan’s democratically elected leaders are routine and consistent with long-standing bipartisan U.S. policy.   

Amid China’s criticism, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi each spoke separately with Lai, underscoring steadfast U.S. support for Taiwan.  

Johnson held a call Wednesday afternoon with Lai, who had recently arrived in Guam following a visit to Taiwan’s Pacific ally, Tuvalu, according to sources who spoke with VOA on the condition of anonymity.

First call

The call marked the first direct conversation between the House speaker and Lai since the latter assumed office in May. Johnson had previously congratulated Lai upon his election in January and renewed the United States’ commitment to the security and democracy of its Indo-Pacific partners. 

Lai arrived in Guam on Wednesday night for a brief layover and is set to depart Thursday afternoon for Palau, the final stop on his weeklong Pacific tour. The trip, which began on November 30, also included stops in Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. This marks Lai’s first overseas trip as president.

VOA has reached out to Johnson’s office for comment.

Bipartisan US policy

“Every democratically elected Taiwan president has transited the United States,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA this week.  

Guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-China Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances, the spokesperson added that U.S. policy toward Taiwan has remained consistent across administrations for 45 years.

Senior U.S. officials have also noted that these documents — the foundations of Washington’s “One China” policy — contain no language explicitly prohibiting a Taiwan president from stopping over in a U.S. city.

Beijing opposition

Beijing, however, accused Washington of interfering in what it calls its “internal affairs.”

Chinese officials said they “firmly oppose” any form of official interaction between the U.S. and Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province.

“Nothing will deter China from upholding national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters this week.

Taiwan has said China’s threats over Lai’s visit are counterproductive.

Garnering US support

Lai’s transits through Hawaii and Guam come as he seeks to garner support from the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has said Taiwan should pay for U.S. protection.

In a closed-door address at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Lai expressed Taiwan’s commitment to deepening cooperation with the U.S. and contributing to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the broader Indo-Pacific region.

Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a prominent China hawk, has sponsored legislation supporting high-level visits by Taiwanese officials to the U.S. and advocating stronger U.S. policy toward Taiwan amid mounting Chinese military and diplomatic pressure.

When asked by VOA if he would maintain his support for Taiwan, Rubio said, “The president sets foreign policy, and our job at the State [Department] will be to execute it.”   

Despite facing sanctions from China, Rubio expressed confidence in finding solutions to engage with Beijing if confirmed. 

Restrictions on Washington  

Under long-standing, self-imposed restrictions by the State Department, a stopover in the capital by a sitting Taiwanese president is considered highly provocative to Beijing.

No sitting Taiwan president, vice president, premier or ministers of foreign affairs and defense has visited Washington for formal meetings while in office.

“I know there’s some diplomatic rules related to leaders of Taiwan coming to the United States,” Republican Representative Andy Barr, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told VOA.

“I think we need to remove any of those impediments. I think President Lai should be able to come to the United States, and we should welcome him.”

The Communist Party-led People’s Republic of China has never governed Taiwan but claims sovereignty over the self-ruled democracy.  

The U.S. has “acknowledged” but never endorsed China’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan.

Washington maintains a “One China” policy distinct from Beijing’s One China principle, taking no official position on Taiwan’s sovereignty and not supporting Taiwan independence.

VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson and Mandarin Service reporter Yihua Lee contributed to this report. 
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Special session of the state Legislature met this week to prepare for expected legal clashes with the new administration
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The Biden administration issued what is likely its final set of export control rules against Beijing earlier this week. The rules forbid companies from exporting an important chip component crucial for training artificial intelligence to China. Experts say it will further constrain the Chinese supply chain for AI. They also expect the next Trump administration to further expand Washington’s strategic tech blockade against China in a more assertive way. 

See the full story here. 

 
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UNITED NATIONS — Ukraine demanded Wednesday that Russia end what Kyiv called “the largest kidnapping campaign in modern history” and return Ukrainian children forcibly transferred from its territory during the ongoing war.

“Ukraine is searching for nearly 20,000 children who were subjected to illegal deportation and forced transfer,” said Daria Zarivna, an adviser to Ukraine’s president and a senior official at his Bring Kids Back Ukraine initiative.

“Yet the actual figure could be much higher, but we can’t find it out — Russian officials systematically refuse to provide information,” Zarivna added.

Zarivna told a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, convened to discuss the situation, that so far 1,022 children have been repatriated, and she urged the international community to pressure Moscow to cooperate.

“Russia must be forced to meet its obligations under international law,” Zarivna said. “It must be compelled to allow access to occupied territories, stop deportations and forced citizenship and political indoctrination of children, provide information about transferred kids, [and] cooperate to bring them home.”

Russia denies it has forcibly transferred children.

“There is no program in Russia on adopting children from the area of the special military operation,” Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said, using the Kremlin term for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Those who are orphans or those who are without relatives were only transferred onto temporary preliminary guardianship or temporary wardship, with Russian citizens,” he said. “Nor is there any basis for the allegation about the forced naturalization of Ukrainian children.”

He said a decree streamlining citizenship simply provides “an opportunity to obtain Russian citizenship for humanitarian reasons” and does not require an individual to give up their Ukrainian citizenship.

But the International Criminal Court disagrees. In March 2023, the court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russian commissioner for children’s rights.

The ICC pretrial chamber said it “considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”

“We call on member states to execute these warrants and ensure accountability,” Ukraine’s Zarivna said.

In June 2023, the U.N. secretary-general added Russia to its blacklist of perpetrators of grave violations against children for Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, including the killing and maiming of children and attacks on schools.

US to sanction abusers

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, announced that the Biden administration is pursuing visa restrictions for five Russian officials and authorities backed or installed by Russia, for their involvement in human rights abuses in Ukraine, including the forced deportation, transfer, and confinement of Ukrainian children.

“Make no mistake: Russian officials and Russian forces have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity,” she said, chastising Moscow for being “intransigent and unrepentant, frustrating international efforts” to identify, locate, and reunite missing children with their families.

Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale University Humanitarian Research Lab, presented his group’s findings that at least 314 Ukrainian children have been placed in the Kremlin’s “program of coerced adoption and fostering” since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

He said 67 of the children have been formally naturalized as Russian citizens, while 208 have been placed with Russian families through adoption or some form of permanent or temporary guardianship.

“The children the Humanitarian Research Laboratory could find were exclusively, we believe, from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, but information reviewed by HRL analysts indicates children from Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Kharkiv oblasts as well — areas captured by Russia after February 2022 — are likely included in the program as well,” Raymond said.

He said that the full number of children from Ukraine that Russia has placed in its adoption and fostering program is not known and his team could not determine it from the data they analyzed.

“Russia must provide Ukraine, the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNICEF, and other relevant authorities a full list of the children it has taken, including those in the database systems that we have reviewed,” Raymond said.

“Until Russia gives up this information, which it is legally and morally required to do, it will be impossible to fully assess how many children exactly from Ukraine are waiting to go home.”
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Для промисловості та бізнесу графіки обмеження потужності триватимуть з 5-ї по 23 годину
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SAN CARLOS, ARIZONA — After missing 40 days of school last year, Tommy Betom, 10, is on track this year for much better attendance. The importance of showing up has been stressed repeatedly at school — and at home. 

When he went to school last year, he often came home saying the teacher was picking on him and other kids were making fun of his clothes. But Tommy’s grandmother Ethel Marie Betom, who became one of his caregivers after his parents split, said she told him to choose his friends carefully and to behave in class. 

He needs to go to school for the sake of his future, she told him. 

“I didn’t have everything,” said Betom, an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache tribe. Tommy attends school on the tribe’s reservation in southeastern Arizona. “You have everything. You have running water in the house, bathrooms and a running car.” 

A teacher and a truancy officer also reached out to Tommy’s family to address his attendance. He was one of many. Across the San Carlos Unified School District, 76% of students were chronically absent during the 2022-2023 school year, meaning they missed 10% or more of the school year. 

Years after COVID-19 disrupted American schools, nearly every state is still struggling with attendance. But attendance has been worse for Native American students — a disparity that existed before the pandemic and has since grown, according to data collected by The Associated Press. 

Out of 34 states with data available for the 2022-2023 school year, half had absenteeism rates for Native American and Alaska Native students that were at least 9 percentage points higher than the state average. 

Many schools serving Native students have been working to strengthen connections with families, who often struggle with higher rates of illness and poverty. Schools also must navigate distrust dating back to the U.S. government’s campaign to break up Native American culture, language and identity by forcing children into abusive boarding schools. 

History “may cause them to not see the investment in a public school education as a good use of their time,” said Dallas Pettigrew, director of Oklahoma University’s Center for Tribal Social Work and a member of the Cherokee Nation. 

On-site health, trauma care 

The San Carlos school system recently introduced care centers that partner with hospitals, dentists and food banks to provide services to students at multiple schools. The work is guided by cultural success coaches — school employees who help families address challenges that keep students from coming to school. 

Nearly 100% of students in the district are Native and more than half of families have incomes below the federal poverty level. Many students come from homes that deal with alcoholism and drug abuse, Superintendent Deborah Dennison said. 

Students miss school for reasons ranging from anxiety to unstable living conditions, said Jason Jones, a cultural success coach at San Carlos High School and an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache tribe. Acknowledging their fears, grief and trauma helps him connect with students, he said. 

“You feel better, you do better,” Jones said. “That’s our job here in the care center is to help the students feel better.” 

In the 2023-2024 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate in the district fell from 76% to 59% — an improvement Dennison attributes partly to efforts to address their communities’ needs. 

“All these connections with the community and the tribe are what’s making a difference for us and making the school a system that fits them rather than something that has been forced upon them, like it has been for over a century of education in Indian Country,” said Dennison, a member of the Navajo Nation. 

In three states — Alaska, Nebraska and South Dakota — the majority of Native American and Alaska Native students were chronically absent. In some states, it has continued to worsen, even while improving slightly for other students, as in Arizona, where chronic absenteeism for Native students rose from 22% in 2018-2019 to 45% in 2022-2023. 

AP’s analysis does not include data on schools managed by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, which are not run by traditional districts. Less than 10% of Native American students attend BIE schools. 

Schools close on days of Native ceremonial gatherings 

At Algodones Elementary School, which serves a handful of Native American pueblos along New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande, about two-thirds of students are chronically absent. 

The communities were hit hard by COVID-19, with devastating impacts on elders. Since schools reopened, students have been slow to return. Excused absences for sick days are still piling up — in some cases, Principal Rosangela Montoya suspects, students are stressed about falling behind academically. 

Staff and tribal liaisons have been analyzing every absence and emphasizing connections with parents. By 10 a.m., telephone calls go out to the homes of absent students. Next steps include in-person meetings with those students’ parents. 

“There’s illness. There’s trauma,” Montoya said. “A lot of our grandparents are the ones raising the children so that the parents can be working.” 

About 95% of Algodones’ students are Native American, and the school strives to affirm their identity. It doesn’t open on four days set aside for Native American ceremonial gatherings, and students are excused for absences on other cultural days as designated by the nearby pueblos. 

For Jennifer Tenorio, it makes a difference that the school offers classes in the family’s native language of Keres. She speaks Keres at home but says that’s not always enough to instill fluency. 

Tenorio said her two oldest children, now in their 20s, were discouraged from speaking Keres when enrolled in the federal Head Start educational program — a system that now promotes native language preservation — and they struggled academically. 

“It was sad to see with my own eyes,” said Tenorio, a single parent and administrative assistant who has used the school’s food bank. “In Algodones, I saw a big difference to where the teachers were really there for the students, and for all the kids, to help them learn.” 

Over a lunch of strawberry milk and enchiladas on a recent school day, her 8-year-old son Cameron Tenorio said he likes math and wants to be a policeman. 

“He’s inspired,” Tenorio said. “He tells me every day what he learns.” 

Home visits 

In Arizona, Rice Intermediate School Principal Nicholas Ferro said better communication with families, including Tommy Betom’s, has helped improve attendance. Since many parents are without working phones, he said, that often means home visits. 

Lillian Curtis said she has been impressed by Rice Intermediate’s student activities on family night. Her granddaughter, Brylee Lupe, 10, missed 10 days of school by mid-October last year but had missed just two days by the same time this year. 

“The kids always want to go — they are anxious to go to school now. And Brylee is much more excited,” said Curtis, who takes care of her grandchildren. 

Curtis said she tells Brylee that skipping school is not an option. 

The district has made gains because it is changing the perception of school and what it can offer, said Dennison, the superintendent. Its efforts have helped not just with attendance but also morale, especially at the high school, she said. 

“Education was a weapon for the U.S. government back in the past,” she said. “We work to decolonize our school system.”   

This story is part of a collaboration on chronic absenteeism among Native American students between The Associated Press and ICT, a news outlet that covers Indigenous issues.
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Vancouver, British Columbia — President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to introduce 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada is getting reaction, not surprisingly, in both countries.

The threat of tariffs on everything coming across the world’s largest undefended border from Canada to the United States got attention but has not been met with overwhelming surprise.

University of British Columbia political scientist Stewart Prest said it is a return to Trump World, where the world is responding to his social media posts. He said Canadian authorities should know from the previous Trump administration to take the threat seriously but not literally.

“But the other piece of it is then to find ways to respond to, address what Mr. Trump is saying, but to do so without simply giving in and waving the white flag,” Prest said. “That the need to push back in creative ways is, I think, an important lesson, as well.”

Trump says he will impose this tariff if Canada and Mexico do not get control of illegal migrants and fentanyl distribution.

According to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, just under 20 kilograms of fentanyl was seized along the Canada-U.S. border in the last fiscal year. During the same time, 9,500 kilograms were seized along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Canada is the largest trading partner of the United States, with goods valued at an average $2.7 billion crossing the almost 9,000-kilometer-long border every day in 2023.

Canada is the United States of America’s largest source of foreign oil. Prest said the proposed tariffs on that would increase costs on everything, and this needs to be effectively communicated.

“[Make] it clear that there are interests that unite the two countries and that they’re far greater than whatever divides us,” Prest said. “Those messages need to be put forward in a variety of formats.”

Andreas Schotter, a professor of global strategy at the Ivey Business School at Western University in Ontario, said the proposed tariffs will hurt both countries. But, he added, they can be avoided if Canada makes serious commitments with tangible results.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is suggesting it could deploy more law enforcement resources to the border, including personnel, helicopters and unmanned drones.

Schotter’s concern is that the most recent demand from Trump may go beyond fentanyl and migration and lead to the cancellation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Trump negotiated in his first term to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“I think he will not wait for 2026 to reopen USMCA,” Schotter said. “I think he will say, ‘Well, you can talk to me now, or I will not talk to you in 2026, and I just cancel it, right?’ So I think he will not respect even the agreed upon timelines, necessarily. And this is worrying me.”

This past weekend, Trudeau, his chief of staff Katie Telford and Minster of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc flew from Ottawa to Trump’s home in Florida for direct talks.

LeBlanc has told multiple media outlets the dinner meeting went well, with Trump emphasizing the prevalence of fentanyl as a main concern. Also discussed was the large trade deficit between United States and Canada. According to the U.S. Trade Representative, this amounted to $53.5 billion in 2022.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce predicts that if the threatened tariffs are put in place, they would shrink Canada’s Gross Domestic Product by 2.6%, and the GDP of the United States by 1.6%.
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Помер 21-річний чоловік, поранений у Велетенському. Раніше прокуратура повідомляла про 9 постраждалих в області
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Вирок винесли за статтею про «державну зраду». Ім’я та прізвище засудженого не називається, у СБУ цей вирок не коментували
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Закон визначає, які категорії ВПО матимуть пріоритетне право на компенсацію за знищені об’єкти нерухомого майна
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Luanda/Lobito, Angola — U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday headed to a U.S.-financed African development project that weaves together his personal love of railroads with his desire to leave a legacy on the continent that will outlive his administration.

The Lobito Corridor is a 1,300-kilometer rail line stretching from copper-rich Zambia to the port of Lobito in the southwest nation of Angola. The network will form a “strategic economic corridor” under the Biden administration’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment – an initiative meant to counter China’s well-established, sprawling Belt and Road initiative. So far, the Biden administration says it has committed nearly $4 billion towards the project. 

Biden, in Angola’s capital on Tuesday, cast the project through his love of passenger rail. As a U.S. senator, he commuted to Washington from Wilmington, Delaware – logging, he said, nearly 340 kilometers on every trip. 

“I must tell you up front, with American press here, I’m probably the most pro-rail guy in America,” Biden said Tuesday in Angola’s capital, to laughter from the audience gathered to hear him speak at the nation’s slavery museum. 

Same, or different?

Senior administration officials said this rail line will, by the end of the decade, be extended to its full length, stretching from Africa’s Indian Ocean coast to the Atlantic port. Initially, it will transport critical minerals like cobalt and copper from the continent’s deep interior to the coast. When the corridor is completed, a journey that now takes more than 40 days by road can zip across the continent in 40 hours. 

“The premise behind the corridor is to be able to take American support and financial capabilities that are limited, and to focus them more deeply in one area, versus spreading that financial support and effort across many countries,” said a senior Biden administration official, who was not identified as is common practice when briefing reporters. 

VOA asked the official whether this repeats the age-old colonial narrative of exploiting the continent’s rich, raw resources while not adding value and providing steady work for local populations. A burgeoning youth population on the continent has created an urgent need for jobs, putting strain on many African governments.  

“I disagree with the premise that this is for raw products,” the official replied. “Right now, only raw product is coming out. But I think what this rail does – in order to get to higher value products, you need a few things. One of them is affordable and reliable and abundant energy. So the build out of the energy system allows you to then build the value added.”

And others questioned whether this U.S. effort, coming more than a decade after China launched its ambitious Belt and Road initiative, can compete. 

“Upon closer inspection, it appears to be a mimic of China’s playbook, one that tacitly acknowledges that Washington lags behind Beijing in terms of its investments in Africa but does little to fill the void that exists in China’s footprint,” said Chris O. Ògúnmọ́dẹdé, an editor, consultant, and analyst of African politics, security, and international relations. 

Wang Peng, a researcher at Renmin University of China, published on a Chinese state thinktank, International Cooperation Center, that Western international projects like the Lobito Corridor don’t pose a challenge to China’s initiative because the United States “can’t provide sufficient funds and material conditions to truly implement its ambitious global infrastructure plan.”

Wang Peng also noted the U.S. could undermine it by exerting diplomatic pressure on host countries to force them to tear up cooperation agreements with China; exaggerate the negative impact of the “Belt and Road” project on the local ecological environment and water resources…. and hype up the so-called “debt trap” issue.”

Mounting Chinese debt among African nations is something Biden also mentioned indirectly in his remarks Tuesday, in seeking to cast the U.S. as a reliable partner. 

“We’ve also pushed to ensure that developing nations do not have to choose between paying down unsustainable debt and being able to invest in their own people,” he said. 

But, as Biden also said, his time is running short as he prepares to leave office, for president-elect Donald Trump. Analysts say this project may be well received by Trump, as it suits his more transactional approach to the continent, and appeals to one of Trump’s biggest backers, billionaire Elon Musk.

“The money has been earmarked already after all,” said James Murphy of Clark University in Massachusetts. “Continuing the Lobito project is a smart idea – Trump does not have to own it except in the sense that it gives him a talking point about our strategic/resource-driven interests in Africa, particularly as a strategy to acquire minerals essential for Elon’s Teslas, as it were.”

Paris Huang contributed to this report.
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В ISW наголошують, що Росія, а не Україна, раніше демонструвала небажання проводити обмін військовополоненими
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GARYVILLE, La. — Louisiana has long relied on a vast levee system to rein in the Mississippi River and protect surrounding communities from flooding. But cutting off the natural flow of the river with man-made barriers has been slowly killing one of the nation’s largest forested wetlands.

The 456 square kilometers of Maurepas Swamp just to the west of New Orleans holds Louisiana’s second-largest contiguous forest, a state wildlife refuge filled with water tupelo and bald cypress trees, their branches adorned by wisps of Spanish moss. A beloved recreation site, the swamp also houses bald eagles, ospreys, black bears and alligators and serves as a waystation for hundreds of different migratory birds.

Deprived of nutrients from the stanched Mississippi River, the swamp’s iconic trees are dying in stagnant water. Yet they’re now set to receive a life-saving boost.

State and federal authorities on Tuesday celebrated breaking ground on an ambitious conservation project intended to replenish the ailing trees by diverting water from the Mississippi back into the swamp.

“This is about reconnecting a natural system, actually fixing it to what it used to be,” said Brad Miller, who has shepherded the project for the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority since 2006.

Miller likened the $330 million river diversion to watering a garden: “The swamp needs river water to be a good swamp.”

The River Reintroduction into Maurepas Swamp will allow for a maximum of 57 cubic meters per second to flow out of a gated opening to be built in the levee system and routed along a 9 9-kilometer diversion channel. The project expects to revitalize around 182 square kilometers of swamp in an area where less than a third of the forest is considered healthy according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Besides injecting much-needed nutrients and oxygen into the swamp, river water will leave thin layers of sediment deposits that mitigate the effect of subsidence — a natural phenomenon on Louisiana’s fragile coast exacerbated by fossil fuel extraction — and climate change-induced sea level rise, said Nick Stevens, a researcher at Southeastern Louisiana University’s wetlands ecology and restoration lab. Healthier forests bolster the swamp with decomposing matter from branches and leaves, he added.

“All of that is completely hindered by not having the Mississippi River attached to it anymore,” Stevens said. “You’ve got all this land sinking as a result of just not getting nutrients.”

The swamp’s diminishing health has had ripple effects on biodiversity, says Erik Johnson, director of conservation science at Audubon Delta, an organization focused on bird ecology in the Mississippi River delta. Some migratory birds like the yellow-throated warbler, prothonotary warbler and the northern parula have had their populations plummet by nearly 50% in the past two decades, Johnson said.

These birds rely on caterpillars who are dependent on water tupelo and bald cypress foliage. When there are fewer healthy leaves for the caterpillars to gorge on, there’s less food for the birds.

“That’s driving a really rapid decline in these bird populations that depend on this one forest,” Johnson said. “The whole system has shifted.”

Scientists say they expect to start seeing an increase in canopy cover and new tree growth within a few years of the project’s anticipated completion in 2028.

Unlike the state’s controversial $3 billion river diversion project intended to combat coastal land loss, the Maurepas project has received widespread support from elected officials and local communities.

The Maurepas project is primarily funded by the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, a multi-state and federal program managing settlement funds from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill that devastated the Gulf Coast.

The Maurepas project benefits from an innovative partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is building an adjacent 30-kilometer levee system to protect several southeast Louisiana parishes. The Corps will count 36 square kilometers of Maurepas Swamp restoration towards offsetting environmental damage caused by the new levee construction, meaning it can direct additional federal funds toward the diversion program.

“For every dollar the state can save here, they have more to invest” in other coastal restoration projects, said John Ettinger, director of policy and environmental compliance with Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council.

And conservationists say the Maurepas reintroduction project highlights the importance of coastal protection and wetlands restoration going hand in hand in a hurricane-prone region.

“You’re going to have a healthier ecosystem on the outside of that levee, which means you’re going to have a better buffer for storm surge and it’s going to allow the levees to be more effective,” said Amanda Moore, National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf Program senior director. “This is how we need to be thinking at large about what’s possible and how we can how we can do more effective conservation by working with nature.”
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