Despite eight years of sustained federal attention and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, parts of Florida's Everglades remain headed toward an "irreversible" ecological collapse, a new report from the National Academies warns.

In stark language, a panel of scientific experts convened by the National Research Council said the government's Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP, "is bogged down in budgeting, planning and procedural matters and is only making scant progress toward achieving restoration goals."

The panel's report went on to say that federal and state agencies overseeing the restoration must achieve measurable results within the next few years. If they do not, the Everglades will experience permanent losses in its biodiversity and ecological function.

"The attempt to restore an ecosystem as large and elaborate as the Everglades is an unprecedented challenge, but if this vision is to be realized, demonstrable progress needs to come soon," said William Graf, a University of South Carolina geographer and chairman of the committee that wrote the report.

The findings from the Committee on Independent Scientific Review of Everglades Restoration Progress are in keeping with a congressional mandate to provide biennial status reports on the now $11 billion project to repair a half-century of damaging human alternations to southern Florida's once pristine wetlands.

Those wetlands are threatened not only by engineered changes such as the construction of levees, canals and other flood-control structures that drained the Everglades, but also by broader climatic changes such as rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion around the edges of the Everglades, coupled with the potential drying up of freshwater resources in the Everglades' interior.

Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland marine scientist and a senior member of the NRC committee, said the new report puts a heightened focus on the effects of climate change because such changes are inherently more complex and could prove much harder to counteract.

"We tried to be very careful of not being alarmist, but we are clearly losing options the longer we wait," Boesch said. "Time is not on our side on this issue of restoration, not only in the Everglades, but in other places around the country."

Nevertheless, the committee said climate change "should not be an excuse for delay or inaction." Rather, such threats should "provide further motivation to restore the resilience of the ecosystem."

Another looming threat, according to the committee, is the loss of rare and endangered species and their habitats in the lower Everglades, which for decades have either been flooded by excessive water being held in storage basins or starved of water needed to hydrate critical habitats such as Everglades National Park.

Two "indicator species" for Everglades health -- the Cape Sable seaside sparrow and the snail kite -- will move closer to extinction over the coming years as their habitats become increasingly degraded, the report says. Similarly, the panel noted that Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades' historic headwaters, continues to suffer from poor water quality due to nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from agricultural activities and suburban sprawl.

Some key projects moving forward

Federal restoration managers, while still reviewing the report, said they were not surprised by the panel's general findings and agreed with the notion that further delays could lead to irreversible declines.

"Some of the scientists are saying we're really in for hard times if we can't get something moving on this thing," said one senior federal restoration official in Florida, who asked not to be identified. "It's a real area of concern, and we share that concern with the folks who are doing the studies out there."

The official noted that some key restoration projects are moving forward, however, including a long-delayed pre-CERP project to restore water flows under Tamiami Trail, the bermed highway that links Miami to Naples and effectively cuts off Everglades National Park from its historic water supply to the north.

That project, known as "modified water deliveries," was authorized by Congress in 1990 and is considered a critical linchpin for the broader restoration. The NRC committee lamented in its report that the slow progress in getting the water deliveries under way is is "one of the most discouraging stories in Everglades restoration."

Nevertheless, the panel noted that several important lessons can be drawn from the difficulty in getting the modified water deliveries moving forward, including "the benefits of early agreement on project scope and objectives, the need for clear project management structure, and the need to anticipate adapting project plans over time."

Click here to review the NRC report.