Preserving Southwest Florida’s coastline as population booms

Southwest Florida has been seeing a lot of growth, but new research suggests that growth may cause us more trouble in the future. While being able to live on the coast may be considered a privilege people pay a lot for, environmentalists say that is ruining the majority of our coastline.

New research from Australia’s University of Queensland shows only 15% of the world’s coastal regions remain intact. Human-caused impacts were the focus of the study; researchers looked at things like pollution, overfishing and cars on the road. They found coastal regions with seagrass, savannah and coral reefs had the highest levels of human pressure compared to other coastal areas.

Larry Bester, president of the Gulf Coast Preservation Society, told WINK News about his takeaway from the study

“The only way that we could slow down that human impact is to slow down human growth and migration from other areas prior, primarily to the coastal areas of Florida and elsewhere,” Bester said. “But as long as that migration continues and development continues, the human impact along the coast is going to be significant. And it’s going to be negative on the environment, certainly for the foreseeable future, because there doesn’t seem to be any slowdown in growth.”

Researchers say the results prove action must be taken quickly if there is any hope to conserve the coastal regions that do remain intact and save those that are already in trouble. James Evans, the CEO of the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation, tells WINK the foundation has been able to preserve 70% of the Sanibel Island coastline.

Betser had suggestions for actions to be taken.

“I think the best thing that humans can do is enact legislation… hate to say that the government has to do something,” Bester said. “It’d be nice if people chose to do it. But, in this particular case, it’s the only way to slow down migration and development along the coast, you need to have some type of restrictions on growth, particularly building moratoriums along coastal areas and within coastal regions, or that development will continue to escalate as it has for the past 75 years here along the Florida coast.”

The study found that more than half of U.S. coastal regions are under high levels of human pressure.