Washington: Acknowledging that its freshwater resources are at increased risk, the Joe Biden administration of the United States of America announced $1 billion for clean water for tribal nations and funding to combat megadrought in the West through President Biden’s ‘Investing in America’ agenda, today, during Earth Week.
(Tribal nations are political powers engaging in commerce, trade, cultural exchange, and inspiring the principles of freedom and democracy enshrined in the US Constitution. As the United States formed a union, the founders acknowledged the sovereignty of tribal nations, alongside states, foreign nations, and the federal government in the U.S. Constitution).
Roughly half of tribal households in the US lack access to clean drinking water or adequate sanitation.
Today’s announcement includes $700 million from Human Services’ Indian Health Services (IHS) and $320 million from the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) to accelerate the delivery of drinking water and community sanitation infrastructure projects in Indian Country (the self-governing Native American/American Indian communities throughout the United States). In addition, IHS and BOR announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two agencies to leverage BOR’s engineering capacity to accelerate the delivery of Tribal water projects.
Through 2019, the U.S. wetlands loss rate increased by 50 per cent over the prior decade. That was before the US Supreme Court’s Sackett decision last year, which dramatically reduced federal protections for wetlands in one of the largest judicial rollbacks of environmental protections in U.S. history.
“Despite this, Congressional Republicans are continuing a decades-long effort to undermine Clean Water Act safeguards,” the White House alleged.
To combat the Western megadrought – an ongoing megadrought in the southwestern region of North America that began in 2000, the US Department of the Interior announced an additional $11 million in new resources from the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART programme. “The Biden-Harris Administration is leading a comprehensive effort to make Western communities more resilient to climate change and address the ongoing megadrought across the region by harnessing the full resources of President Biden’s historic Investing in America agenda,” the White House stated. It informed that together, the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided the largest investment in climate resilience in the history of the United States, including $15.4 billion to enhance the West’s resilience to drought and deliver unprecedented resources to protect river systems across the West.
To better protect America’s freshwater systems. many states are already using their own authorities and resources. For example, North Carolina recently set a goal to protect one million acres of natural lands, with a special focus on wetlands, and to restore one million acres of forests and wetlands within the state. New York State recently enacted statutory changes to its Freshwater Wetlands Act that will safeguard an additional million acres of valuable wetlands. Washington recently protected almost 1,000 miles of rivers as Outstanding National Resource Waters, one of the highest levels of protection afforded to our freshwater resources.
The Department of the Interior today announced more than $70 million from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda for 43 projects in 29 states that will address outdated dams, culverts, levees and other barriers to the nation’s rivers and streams. “This Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding will help restore fragmented aquatic habitats and revitalize local economies in communities across the nation while creating new jobs in construction and implementation,” the White House stated. The funding is also part of an investment of over $3 billion across federal agencies in fish passage and aquatic connectivity projects under President Biden’s ‘Investing in America’ agenda.
– global bihari bureau
