"As Seas Rise, U.S. Coastal Landowners Urged To Let The Water In"

"Led by Maryland, governments and green groups are offering incentives to allow threatened saltwater marshes to 'migrate' inland".

"DORCHESTER COUNTY, Md. - Rising seas were never an issue for Donald Webster for the first 45 years he lived and farmed alongside the Chesapeake Bay. But since the mid-1990s, he has been forced to give up parts of his fields to the saltwater creeping its way inland.

This year alone, he lost three acres (1.2 hectares) of sorghum-growing land to encroaching seawater, probably resulting in an annual loss of about $300, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, as he stood in a patch of white, parched soil.

But the bigger question for Webster, 67, who manages about 300 acres for a landowner in Dorchester County, was what to do with that salt-affected property

Hoping to slow the damage, Webster tried an experiment two decades ago, building three-foot-high (1-meter-high) berms of soil around eight acres of farmland that had become too salty, helping trap rainwater and create freshwater marsh."

Carey L. Biron reports for Thomson Reuters Foundation September 7, 2022.

Source: Thomson Reuters Fdn., 09/12/2022