Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told global leaders at the 2021 Climate Change Conference that Louisiana is “ground zero” for the United States in the fight against climate change. Edwards has spent the week in Glasgow as global leaders attempt to chart a path towards carbon neutrality by 2050.
Edwards spoke about the historic 14 month stretch of extreme weather events the state has endured.
“We’ve had five major hurricanes strike our state in the last 14 months, we’ve also had a freak winter storm, we’ve had flash flooding, all of this as you know carried out during a pandemic,” said Edwards.
Edwards noted the state has adopted a 50-year, 50-billion dollar coastal master plan in an effort to make the state more resilient in the face of future major storms.
“We have lost 2,000 square miles of land in the last 80 years and every bit of this is coastal marsh and every acre of coastal marsh can sequester 80 times as much carbon as forest land,” said Edwards who added the state is already investing a billion dollars a year in the master plan, and creating thousands of jobs doing so.
