Everglades Restoration Passes Its 11th Scientific Review With Storage Gains and an Unsolved Phosphorus Problem

The National Academies' Committee on Independent Scientific Review of Everglades Restoration Progress has completed its 11th biennial review of the largest ecosystem restoration effort ever attempted in the United States. The review lands alongside state reporting that documents substantial gains in water storage capacity and a persistent, in some places worsening, problem with the phosphorus pollution that restoration was meant to solve.

The review process

The National Academies committee has been reviewing Everglades restoration progress since 2004, issuing independent assessments every two years. That schedule was written into the program's authorizing framework specifically so that an outside scientific body, rather than the agencies doing the work, would evaluate whether the effort is achieving its goals.

The reviews assess technical progress, evaluate whether project sequencing makes scientific sense, and examine whether monitoring is adequate to detect ecosystem response. They have historically been candid about shortfalls, and their independence from both the state and federal agencies involved is what gives them credibility.

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, known as CERP, was authorized by Congress in 2000 as a partnership between the federal government and the State of Florida. It encompasses dozens of individual projects intended to restore something closer to the historical flow of water through the system while continuing to provide flood protection and water supply for South Florida's population and agriculture.

What has been accomplished

State reporting through the South Florida Water Management District's annual environmental report documents substantial progress on water storage. Investments have tripled water storage capacity in South Florida, and officials have cited Florida Bay reaching salinity targets for the first time in decades as evidence that restored freshwater flow is producing ecological response.

The Picayune Strand Restoration Project was completed earlier in 2026. It was the first CERP project to begin construction and stands as one of the largest wetland restoration efforts undertaken anywhere, involving the removal of roads and canals from a failed 1960s residential subdivision in Collier County and the restoration of natural sheet flow across roughly 55,000 acres.

Construction contracts for the Everglades Agricultural Area reservoir have been fully executed on an accelerated schedule, a milestone the governor's office has highlighted. That reservoir is the central piece of the plan for storing and treating water south of Lake Okeechobee before sending it into the remaining Everglades.

The phosphorus problem

The finding that cuts against the progress narrative concerns water quality. Reporting has documented that phosphorus flowing from the constructed treatment wetlands into protected areas of the Everglades rose between 2024 and 2025, in some cases substantially. Those treatment wetlands, known as stormwater treatment areas, represent roughly $2 billion in investment.

Phosphorus is the central water quality problem in the Everglades because the ecosystem evolved under extraordinarily low nutrient conditions. Sawgrass marsh, periphyton mats and the food web built on them depend on that scarcity. Elevated phosphorus, primarily from agricultural runoff, converts sawgrass marsh to cattail monoculture, which supports far less biodiversity.

The legal standard for phosphorus entering the Everglades Protection Area is 10 parts per billion, a threshold established through decades of litigation and scientific determination. It is an extraordinarily low number, roughly equivalent to a pinch of a substance in a swimming pool, and meeting it consistently has proven to be the hardest technical challenge in the entire restoration.

Why it matters beyond the marsh

The Everglades is not primarily a nature preserve in functional terms. It is the recharge system for the Biscayne Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to roughly eight million people across South Florida. Water that infiltrates through the Everglades recharges the aquifer, and reduced flow accelerates saltwater intrusion from the coast.

Saltwater intrusion is already advancing in coastal Miami-Dade and Broward counties, and it is driven by both sea level rise and reduced freshwater head pressure from the interior. Restoring flow through the system is a water supply strategy for South Florida's cities as much as it is an environmental one.

The system also connects to coastal water quality on both coasts. Lake Okeechobee discharges east through the St. Lucie River and west through the Caloosahatchee River carry nutrients that feed algal blooms in the estuaries and, research has concluded, contribute to red tide blooms in the Gulf. Storing and treating water south of the lake reduces the volume of those damaging discharges.

The money and the timeline

Everglades restoration is funded jointly by the state and federal governments, an arrangement that requires sustained appropriations from both. The state's investment has grown substantially, with proposed budgets adding more than a billion dollars in a single year and cumulative state investment reported in the range of $9.5 billion.

Federal appropriations move through the Army Corps of Engineers budget and through water resources development legislation. Florida's congressional delegation has historically worked across party lines on Everglades funding, one of the few policy areas where that has been reliably true.

The timeline has extended well beyond original projections. CERP was initially envisioned as a roughly 30-year program when authorized in 2000. Twenty-six years in, major components remain under construction and the program's completion date has moved repeatedly. Cost estimates have similarly grown well past initial figures.

What it means for Floridians

For South Florida water customers, the restoration is infrastructure that protects the aquifer they drink from. The connection is indirect enough that most residents do not associate their water bill with the Everglades, but the hydrological relationship is direct.

For residents along the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, in Lee, Martin and St. Lucie counties, the practical measure of restoration progress is whether discharge-driven algal blooms decline. Those communities have experienced blooms severe enough to close beaches, damage tourism and generate federal disaster declarations.

For Southwest Florida coastal communities, red tide remains the recurring threat, and research linking Lake Okeechobee discharges to bloom intensity means restoration progress has a direct bearing on beach conditions. Marine debris cleanup from severe bloom events has run into the millions of pounds in single counties.

What restoration is supposed to deliver

The measurable goals of Everglades restoration are ecological, hydrological and economic. Ecologically, the targets include recovery of wading bird nesting populations, restoration of tree island habitat, reduction of cattail encroachment and improvement of conditions for species including the Everglades snail kite, the wood stork and the Florida panther.

Hydrologically, the goal is restoring the timing, distribution and volume of water flowing south through the system. Getting the volume right without the timing produces limited benefit, because the ecosystem's species evolved around a seasonal pattern of wet and dry periods rather than around a constant water level.

Economically, the case rests on water supply security for South Florida's population, on the commercial and recreational fisheries that depend on Florida Bay and the estuaries, and on a tourism economy that draws visitors to Everglades National Park, the Keys and both coasts. Those interests are what have sustained bipartisan funding across administrations.

How the system got broken

Understanding the restoration requires understanding what was altered. The historical Everglades was a shallow sheet of water roughly 60 miles wide moving slowly south from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, a system that functioned as a single connected flow rather than as discrete water bodies.

Beginning in the late 19th century and accelerating dramatically after devastating floods in the 1920s and 1940s, the state and federal governments built one of the largest water control systems in the world across South Florida. Roughly 1,800 miles of canals and levees, along with hundreds of water control structures, were constructed to drain land for agriculture and development and to protect growing coastal cities from flooding.

The system worked as designed. It made the Everglades Agricultural Area farmable, allowed South Florida's coastal cities to expand into land that had been marsh, and largely ended the catastrophic flooding that had killed thousands. It also cut the historical Everglades roughly in half and severed the flow that sustained the remainder.

Restoration does not mean removing that infrastructure. Nine million people now live in South Florida behind it, and the agricultural region south of Lake Okeechobee is a major economic sector. The plan instead attempts to redirect and store water so that something closer to natural flow reaches the remaining marsh while flood protection and water supply continue.

That constraint, restoring an ecosystem without removing the infrastructure that damaged it, is what makes the effort so technically difficult and so expensive. Every project is an engineering compromise among competing demands, and the scientific reviews exist to assess whether those compromises still add up to restoration.

Sea level rise adds a dimension the original plan did not fully anticipate. Rising seas push saltwater further inland, and the freshwater head pressure that restoration is meant to rebuild is also the primary defense against that intrusion. Restoration and climate adaptation have become the same project in South Florida.

What's next

The National Academies review's findings will inform planning and funding decisions at both the state and federal level over the coming two years, and the next biennial review follows in 2028. Those reviews function as a periodic check on whether the program's sequencing and monitoring remain scientifically sound.

Construction continues on the Everglades Agricultural Area reservoir and on other CERP components. The reservoir's completion is the milestone most closely watched, because it is the piece that most directly addresses both the discharge problem and the flow shortfall to the southern Everglades.

The phosphorus question remains the harder one. Additional treatment capacity, source controls in the agricultural area and improved operation of existing treatment wetlands are all part of the response, but the recent trend in the data indicates the problem is not yet solved.