America’s Great Waters
America's Great Waters | About the Coalition | Regional Highlights
About the Coalition
NPCA co-chairs America's Great Waters Coalition, which formed in 2009 with the goal of making the restoration of our Great Waters a national priority. To date, over 50 local, regional, and national organizations form the coalition with the belief that by working together we will help nationalize our priorities and bring more strength to each region’s efforts to protect and restore each Great Waters ecosystem.
America’s Great Waters Coalition envisions a day when America embraces its Great Waters and ensures they are healthy, valued, and productive resources for our nation.
Three main goals that drive the Coalition’s work are:
- Making the restoration of our Great Waters a national priority.
- Securing sustainable dedicated funding for restoration.
- Enacting and ensuring sound implementation of restoration.
NPCA is committed to protecting and restoring Great Waters as part of our campaign to ensure that national parks are more fully protected and sustained as parts of larger landscapes. We are supporting the following efforts:
- The world's largest ecosystem restoration project is occurring in South Florida and affecting three national park units: Everglades and Biscayne National Parks, and Big Cypress National Preserve. The goal of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project is to capture and store a large portion of the 1.7 billion gallons of water lost each day to the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico and redirect it to areas that need it most.
- The National Park Service received $10.5 million from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative in 2010 to conduct on-the-ground or in-the-water restoration projects in 12 park units around the Great Lakes, including Indiana Dunes and Apostle Islands National Lakeshores, to address major threats related to toxic substances, habitat and wildlife, and invasive species.
- The Elwha Ecosystem Restoration Project in Olympic National Park is the largest dam removal project in the U.S. Once the two dams are removed, historic levels of salmon and steelhead are expected to return, with numbers exceeding 300,000 adult fish, compared to the present 4,500 fish.
NPCA plays a lead role in these and other ecosystem restoration-focused coalitions:
- Choose Clean Water Coalition: Chesapeake Bay
- Everglades Coalition: Everglades
- Healing Our Waters – Great Lakes Coalition: Great Lakes
