You need not travel far to hear how nature throughout Florida can recover from future disturbances.

A Punta Gorda conference on helping people and agencies recover from future extreme weather events is scheduled for September. Hosting the event is the Coastal & Heartland National Estuary Partnership.

The 2026 Southwest Florida Resiliency Summit will be held at the Charlotte Harbor Event and Conference Center on Tuesday, Sept. 22, starting at 8:30 a.m.

The free event will feature experts from business, academia, and government with practical information and ideas on increasing nature’s ability to rebound from extreme changes in Southwest Florida.

That includes how future Earth will respond to severe ocean temperatures, stronger weather, and changing sea levels during advanced global warming. Coined "resiliency,” it’s the ability of a natural system, like a wetland or river — or even the Florida Everglades — to absorb a disturbance and keep working the way it's supposed to, or, whether it will recover quickly afterward.

A storm, a drought, or a wildfire are disturbances in the natural world; the building of subdivisions of homes or businesses count, too, as disturbances to the environment.

What to do if and when an ecosystem stops bouncing back will not be ignored. Speakers will lead several classes to explain how an ecosystem can turn for the worse — and stay that way.

The Coastal & Heartland National Estuary Partnership is an underwriter for WGCU Public Media which is a media sponsor for the event.

Even though tickets are free, seating is limited so advance registration is required.

About CHNEP: The Coastal & Heartland National Estuary Partnership (formerly the Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program) began when former Florida Governor Chiles submitted a nomination to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to designate the greater Charlotte Harbor estuarine system as an estuary of national significance. On July 6, 1995, seven nominations were accepted, including the CHNEP. Now the CHNEP is one of 28 organization nation-wide in the NEP; one of the four in Florida (along with Tampa Bay, Sarasota Bay, and Indian River Lagoon).

Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.

WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.

A Charlotte Harbor-based member of the national estuary program will host a summit later this month to bring together scientists, local officials, and residents to discuss how climate change is impacting Southwest Florida and ways to deal with the challenges.

The summit is designed to expand the region’s ability to prepare for and recover from climate change — global warming, rising seas, stronger hurricanes, heavier rain, frequent flooding, longer and stronger heat waves—so people stay safe, homes and businesses are protected, and daily life can continue.

A warmer world means hotter oceans, and when water heats up it expands, which increases sea level. Warmer water feeds hurricanes, and warmer air means they can hold more rain.

“The past year brought hurricanes Helene and Milton as well as other extreme high heat and rainfall events, impacting critical infrastructure needed for protecting human health and safety and our environment.” Jennifer Hecker, the Coastal & Heartland National Estuary Partnership’s director. The summit “provides vital new information to better protect our communities, exceptional natural resources, and quality of life.”

There will also be information on lessons learned. Hecker said that should help reduce damage and keep functional systems, such as the power grid, the drinking water system, roads, hospitals, and communications, intact.

A major goal of the summit is to provide residents with access to their political leaders, as well as representatives from utility providers, hospitals, schools, and businesses, to exchange ideas and potentially reach a consensus on what it’ll take to work better together in the future.

The summit will be held at the Sunseeker Resort in Port Charlotte on Sept. 16 and 17.

The event starts both days at 8 a.m. The cost is $30, but organizers said those who want to attend but can’t afford it should sign up and won’t be turned away.

To register, click here.

Growing Climate Solution, a grassroots coalition of environmental stalwarts in Southwest Florida, commissioned a poll in 2022. It found that a majority of residents believe climate change is real, is happening now, and future generations will feel the impacts.

The survey also found sociopolitical divides over the issue. Republicans who believe climate change is happening were far more likely to say it’s due to natural causes, and only 35% believe individual efforts can reduce the pollution causing climate change.

Democrats who believe climate change is happening are far more likely to say it’s due to manmade causes. Nearly 90% believe individual efforts can reduce the pollution causing climate change.

And many Republicans and some independents in the Southwest Florida region are less concerned about the effects of a warming planet, and less supportive of possible solutions. They say they are more worried about the economy than ecology.

On the flip side, Democrats and other independents were largely concerned about climate change and wanted to find possible solutions. A vast majority were more concerned about acting on climate change than economic growth.

It’s hoped the 2025 Southwest Florida Resiliency Summit will help everyone — Republicans, Democrats, independents — work better together when facing the future.

The National Estuary Program was established by Congress in 1987 to protect and restore the water quality and ecological integrity of estuaries of national significance run by the Environmental Protection Agency.

There are 28 estuaries in the program along the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts and in Puerto Rico.

Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by Volo Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.

Sign up for WGCU's monthly environmental newsletter, the Green Flash, today. WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida.

We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you. WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.

Underneath the 52-square-mile surface area of Sarasota Bay’s expansive range are seagrass meadows currently increasing in size, in health, and in biodiversity despite a population boom that started a hundred years ago and has yet to slow.

Decades of efforts to restore the bay’s deteriorating water quality met with fits and starts, but mostly failure.

Sea grass meadows, the “canary in the coal mine” for a lagoon-like ecosystem along Florida’s Gulf Coast, have been disappearing as the water quality worsened, blocking out the sun the grasses need to grow and allowing algae that thrive on pollution to envelop the grasses and strangle them. Boaters drove their engines through the shallows, collectively ripping out acre after acre of sea grass one prop scar at a time.

Seagrasses provide critical habitat for marine life such as fish, crabs, shrimp, manatees, and sea turtles while also stabilizing shorelines and improving water clarity. They even play a role in mitigating climate change by storing carbon within their root systems.

However, the benefits are easily undone when water quality deteriorates due to nutrient pollution and the damage from boat propellers.

It’s happening all around Florida, in few places worse than the Indian River Lagoon, which runs up the state’s east coast from Palm Beach County to north of Cape Canaveral, where entire sections are devoid of sea grasses — and fish, and manatees, and anglers — due to pollution running into the bay from massive, uncontrolled development along the shoreline.

In Sarasota Bay, stalwarts like Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, and many other groups worked with water managers and municipal leaders to restore the water quality in the type of joint effort tried in countless other coastal regions of Florida without success.

Success is what is being seen in Sarasota Bay today.

Key is government and regional water management agencies in the Sarasota Bay region spent $300 million to stem the flow of pollutants, nutrients, and human waste into the bay by upgrading wastewater treatment plants and retrofitting more than 6,000 acres of the watershed with regional stormwater treatment systems, and spent considerable efforts on public information campaigns on the role residents can have in helping to stem individual contributions to pollution in the bay.

The estuary program has just released this year’s results – seagrass coverage in Sarasota Bay increased by 19% between 2022 and 2024, adding 1,912 acres of underwater meadows to support hundreds of thousands of juvenile fish, and create more healthy plants that can help keep the bay clean in their ways.

“This is an encouraging sign,” said David Tomasko, director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program. “But we still have a long way to go before we can say the bay is fully healthy.”

History lesson

Sarasota Bay was a key waterway for the Tocobago, Timucuan, and Calusa tribes in the 1500s. They thrived, and large shell mounds are still visible today in places near the waterfront.

Cuban fishermen camped on the same shores from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, trading in mullet and other seafood.

The decline in water quality, which eventually led to a decline in sea grasses, started with large-scale drainage projects to support the heady rate of homes and neighborhoods that were developed in the late 1800s at Sarasota Bayfront, and spots to the immediate north and south.

Sarasota Bay’s water quality started a serious slide toward unsustainability after World War II when development intensified, leading to significant environmental changes.

Between 1950 and 1990, about 39% of tidal wetlands and 30% of seagrass meadows were lost due to development. Nutrients, including chemicals in fertilizers, were dumped into the bay, either on purpose or due to the lack of environmental repercussions at the time, further stressing water quality.

Eventually, shorelines were altered by seawalls, feeder creeks polluted by businesses and homeowners, and a population boom sent an impossible amount of stormwater runoff and wastewater into the bay, impacting seagrass health lowering meadows from a peak of 13,473 acres in 2016 to just 9,962 acres in 2022 — a loss of more than a quarter of its seagrass beds six years.

That Sarasota Bay’s underwater seagrass meadows are surging back is not only a hopeful sign that efforts to reclaim the health of bays off heavily developed shorelines can work, but it very well may be a blueprint for coastal regions facing similar threats.

The resurgence in Sarasota Bay stands in stark contrast to conditions in other Southwest Florida waterways, where seagrass losses remain a pressing issue.

In Charlotte Harbor, located just south of Sarasota Bay, seagrass acreage declined by 23% between 2018 and 2021.

The harbor has been plagued by excess nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff and urban development, which fuels algae growth that blocks sunlight from reaching seagrass beds.

Despite community-led monitoring programs like Florida Sea Grant’s “Eyes on Seagrass,” reversing these declines has proven difficult.

“Seagrasses are an overarching indicator of the health of an estuary,” said Jennifer Hecker, director of the Coastal and Heartland National Estuary Partnership based in Charlotte Harbor. “When they're declining, that is an indicator that the system is declining in health, and that will, in turn, negatively affect our fisheries, our water quality, and the general ecological health of our coastal waters. So we really need to continue to monitor and track what is going on and get to the root causes.”

Further south, the Caloosahatchee River in Lee County has faced decades of sea grass losses, particularly tape grass. Once covering thousands of acres, tape grass has been decimated by altered freshwater flows and nutrient pollution.

Restoration projects are underway, including sea grass replanting efforts – so precious are the baby shoots that cages are placed over them to prevent grazing by manatees.

For the Caloosahatchee River, a lot is riding on the upcoming completion of the a huge reservoir that will divert water flowing from the highly polluted Lake Okeechobee into manmade wetlands to be cleaned before being return to the river. Hope is that will help.

Estero Bay has seen some of the most severe seagrass declines in Southwest Florida. Only about 4% of its historical seagrass coverage remains due to skyrocketing nitrogen levels that have fueled massive algae blooms that smother seagrass beds.

Estero Bay continues to suffer from nutrient-rich runoff from agricultural lands, septic systems, and aging wastewater infrastructure.

Environmental nonprofits warn that without fast action to reduce pollution and restore natural water flows, Estero Bay’s ecosystem could face irreparable damage.

The challenges facing these neighboring waterways underscore just how significant Sarasota Bay’s recent gains are—and how fragile they remain.

‘Most to gain; most to lose’

Sarasota Bay’s recovery follows the years of collaborative efforts among local governments, environmental organizations, and residents. Now, ongoing monitoring efforts track both the increasing seagrass acreage as well as nitrogen levels and algae concentrations to provide a complete picture of Sarasota Bay’s health.

While there is reason for cautious optimism in Sarasota Bay, Tomasko said more work needs to be done and continued vigilance is necessary to sustain the gains made so far.

“When you live on the waterfront, you have the most to gain — and the most to lose.”

Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.

Sign up for WGCU's monthly environmental newsletter, the Green Flash, today.

WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.

Several yards from some mangrove trees nestled along the northwestern bank of the Caloosahatchee, the Executive Director of CHNEP, Jennifer Hecker, looked at the progress of seagrass that planted over six months ago.  

Historically, the river has supported vast seagrass beds but much of it was lost in recent years— in part because of alterations in water flows in the Tidal Caloosahatchee River.

The tan riverbed leading up to the shore is bare, with the exception of five cylindrical cages that poke out a few inches above the water. Underneath them, seagrass is growing abundantly. 

"This is the first documented instance in over a decade that we’ve had seagrasses growing and flowering in the Tidal Caloosahatchee River," Hecker said. "So, we’re extremely excited about this development.”

Various species of seagrasses were planted by trained citizen volunteers at five different locations along the Caloosahatchee to see which type would be able to withstand the fickle salinity of the river water.

The species Vallisneria Americana, commonly known as “eel grass,”  grew several inches tall underneath the cages. The cages were placed over the seedlings when they were planted in order to protect them from being grazed upon before becoming established. 

Hecker explained that while the grasses are a vital part of the river's ecosystem. 

“We’re basically trying to keep the seagrasses on life support right now," Hecker said. "They are the base of the food chain, they help to support everything from crabs and fish to endangered manatees. Providing that food source to our aquatic life and our ecosystem is essential."

Hecker also said the seagrasses also help to improve water quality and clarity by absorbing nutrients and sediment.

In about a month, volunteers will remove the cages in the hope that the seagrass beds will expand on their own.