Hello, welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

I'm Beth Timmins and today I'm in southern Louisiana.

It's losing its coastal wetlands at the rate of a football field washing away every hundred minutes.

And this loss is also worsening the land's protections against storm surges, floods and hurricanes.

The land loss is down to a few factors, oil and gas exploration, sea levels rising,

and the flood controls and levees that have shackled the Mississippi River to stop it overflowing.

But now, the state is trying to fix this, starting work on the largest ecosystem restoration project in U.S. history.

It's being paid for by nearly $3 billion in settlement money from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster,

which 13 years later is still the world's worst oil spill.

The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an

epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years. I'll be finding out how the money

will be spent and how the community's been taking matters into its own hands. That's all coming up

in today's episode.

Many have tried to tame the Mississippi.

Whenever the Mississippi topped its banks, something that used to happen yearly,

the colossal river would cast silt and clay across its floodplains, the buildup compacting and creating new land.

But levees, embankments built to stop flooding, then shackled

the Mississippi to control and prevent overflowing. The river is the lowest that it has been in 30

years. That's why we're getting this saltwater intrusion that we're getting. The river has fallen low.

So as pertaining to when I first started here back in 1992, up until now, it has changed

a good bit. How I think it's going to really affect us overall, that remains to be told.

That's Captain Donald Hall. He spoke to me as we looked out over the tea-colored waters

...