Miami’s drought wake-up call: Everglades restoration is our water insurance | Opinion

Miami Herald, May 5, 2026

By Michael Berkowitz and Meenakshi Chabba

Aerial view of dried-out airboat paths in the Everglades. Photo by The Everglades Foundation.

In February, Miami-Dade residents were startled by announcements of water use restrictions, the result of plummeting levels in the Biscayne aquifer. For a region that receives nearly 60 inches of rain annually, scarcity felt like someone else’s problem. The ongoing drought has shattered that sense of abundance and revealed the vulnerability of South Florida’s water supply.

As residents of a storm- and flood-prone coastal region, most Miamians think of resilience mainly as flood adaptation, leaving water security as an under acknowledged pillar. Long before resilience guided climate change strategies, leading scientists and planners understood that the single most consequential action to secure South Florida’s future was to restore the Everglades.

This foresight led to the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan in 2000, making Everglades restoration the pioneer resilience plan for Florida. For more than 25 years, restoration has quietly ensured that residents receive high-quality drinking water, and it is increasingly proving to be something far larger: a resilience multiplier, yielding surprising dividends to a climate-vulnerable Miami.

The Everglades wetlands span the length of Florida’s southern peninsula and more than half of Miami-Dade. They capture, store and filter the region’s plentiful rainfall before slowly recharging the Biscayne aquifer, the primary source of drinking water for southeast Florida. However, drainage for agriculture, urban development and flood control diminished the Everglades’ historic extent, its freshwater flows, and ability to store and clean water. Rising seas have compounded these legacy impacts, accelerating saltwater intrusion into the highly permeable aquifer. February’s water use restrictions were not an anomaly. They were symptoms of a vulnerability set in motion long before the drought developed.

Read the full Miami Herald article here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article315629199.html

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