Funding for Everglades Restoration Research Program “Inadequate,” Says Academy Report

Inadequate funding is hampering the efforts of a science research component of the ambitious, multi-year, federal-state-private sector effort to restore the Greater Everglades ecosystem, according to a recent report by the U.S. National Research Council. Investment in the U.S. Interior Department's Critical Ecosystem Studies Initiative (CESI), established in the mid-1990s, “has measurably eroded,” the NRC report noted, and as a result, “high-priority scientific research needs” of the restoration effort “have gone unmet.”