Shaheen, Hassan Announce NOAA Grants to Protect and Strengthen New Hampshire’s Coastal Communities

WASHINGTON – Today, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan announced that The Nature Conservancy and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services will receive nearly $1.4 million in federal grants through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coastal Resilience Grants Program to protect and strengthen New Hampshire and the region’s coastal communities.

“The new grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Coastal Resilience Grants Program will help support important weather and safety infrastructure across the Seacoast,” said Senator Shaheen. “In my position as the lead Democrat on the subcommittee that oversees NOAA’s budget, I have made it a top priority to ensure NOAA has the resources it needs to help protect New Hampshire’s Seacoast from the impacts of climate change. These new grants from NOAA are key to our efforts to protect our environment and prepare our communities from natural disasters and rising sea levels.”

“Our coastal communities are integral to our environment, our economy, and our way of life in New Hampshire, and we must do everything that we can to protect these regions from the very real environmental threats that are a result of climate change, including sea-level rise and flooding,” Senator Hassan said. “These grants from NOAA build on our conservation efforts to protect and preserve the natural resources that make the Granite State special, and I will continue fighting to combat climate change and protect our environment.”

The Nature Conservancy received nearly $1 million in federal funding to implement and monitor a range of nature-based infrastructure projects to protect New Hampshire and the region’s coastal communities from flooding and to evaluate the effectiveness of such projects. The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services received $370,000 in federal funding to remove two damns on the Bellamy River, helping to increase safety in the area, allow fish to swim upstream to spawning habitats, and restore 21 acres of floodplain wetlands. For more information, visit https://coast.noaa.gov/resilience-grant/.

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