Rockaway is a New York Coastal Community Trying to Fight Erosion–and Then EPA Cancelled Funding

Adriana Jovanovic clambered cheerfully over the metal railing next to the dunes along Rockaway Beach. She landed in a patch of sand where she and her team, nicknamed the “dune squad,” had sown roses and goldenrod among other native plants. 

“We’re hand watering those that need a little extra help,” she said as about a dozen helpers walked around with large water jugs that they filled from a hydrant across the street. 

The local nonprofit Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity (RISE) is restoring a three-mile stretch of beach in Far Rockaway to help battle coastal erosion from sea level rise and storm surge. The dune squad, all local residents, work part time from spring to fall.

But RISE’s efforts on that beach relied on one crucial source that was recently lost: a portion of a three-year $11.2 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. The cache was slated for local restoration efforts and upgrades for New York City Parks Department’s native plant nursery and seedbank in Staten Island. 

The grant also covered training for 60 unemployed people from disadvantaged communities for climate-related jobs, mentoring for 75 high school students and the removal of four tons of waste and marine debris across Rockaway beaches. 

In April, the Washington Post reported that, according to a court document, the EPA was cancelling 781 grants, many of which were related to environmental justice. 

RISE’s funding, which was to continue through January 2028, dried up within weeks. RISE, legally known as the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, had received about $100,000 of its $11.2 million grant, according to the USASpending.gov website, before the funding was shut down.

For Rockaway as well as the city’s Parks Department, the EPA edict is a devastating blow. 

RISE has established a new 13-acre nursery along Rockaway Beach to grow native coastal species, specifically for conservation efforts along the Rockaway shoreline and serve not only their own restoration efforts, but that of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NYC Parks and other local groups.

A spokesperson for the New York City Parks Department said its Native Plant Center had expected RISE funds to upgrade its plant nursery facilities and improve a pipeline of plants appropriate for coastal habitats.

The dune squad’s effort is a small part of a holistic effort to improve and conserve Rockaway beaches, said Alana Danieu, RISE’s program manager. The work to replace stubborn invasive plants, like wheatgrass, knotweed and mugwort, with plants that are native to the ecosystem added color and increased biodiversity, Danieu said.

“All of our plantings are looked after by community members. When people have contributed to a natural space, they’re more likely to be invested,” she said. Plantings are usually community events where residents from across the area join for hours of neighborly gardening. Since the nonprofit’s own nursery is in an early stage, most plants this spring were purchased from a nursery in New Jersey.

With the EPA grant terminated, RISE staff are scrambling to find funding sources to continue their work. Executive director Jeanne DuPont says she plans to focus on the dune restoration and the nursery for now.

“Most of our eggs are all in this one basket now,” DuPont said. “We don’t have money for any more Covid or health related outreach. We don’t have any more money for food distribution, so all the other stuff that we were doing, we’ve actually completely cut back on.”

“We Didn’t Really Know What to Do”

The RISE grant, funded under the Biden administration’s 2024 Inflation Reduction Act Community Change Grants Program, was available at the beginning of February. A week later, according to DuPont, she withdrew a small amount of money. By the end of week two, she said, RISE no longer could access the funds.

“Our entire account was shut down and suspended so we couldn’t draw down money,” said DuPont. “We didn’t really know what to do.”

The grant was supposed to help create green jobs for local residents through its coastal resilience work.

“Rockaway is isolated, there aren’t many paid positions in the peninsula,” said Danieu, who oversees programs.

DuPont said she has spent what grant money she had on the organization’s nursery and restoring local dunes. Other plans, like a waste management initiative, a food equity program and a partnership with the city’s Parks Department were dropped.

“If this money does not come through—and it looks like now it won’t—there are a lot of government agencies, including the Parks Department, that are going to be very hard hit,” DuPont said. 

The grant portal reopened in April, and DuPont was able to draw some funds to reimburse her organization’s work before receiving a termination notice on May 2.

In response to questions from Inside Climate News, Parks Department spokesperson Judd Faulkner wrote in an email that the agency “will continue the coastal native plant production using existing funds while we seek alternative funding sources for facility improvements.”

The EPA provided an email that said “as with any change in Administration, EPA has been reviewing all of its grant programs and awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities.” 

The email added: “Maybe the Biden-Harris Administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

The EPA also confirmed that it is committed to reimbursing grantees for funds spent prior to the termination notice in May. Beyond that, RISE will likely not see much more from the federal grant. Even the dune squad, which is still weeding and replanting, will likely have to be “scaled back” as the organization adjusts its budget and priorities through 2028, Danieu said.

“It really limits what we can plan for,” Danieu said.

Rockaway Peninsula Challenged on All Fronts

The Rockaway Peninsula, a long strip of land that juts out of Queens, is experiencing coastal erosion on the beach side, which faces the Atlantic Ocean, and on the bay, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Sea level rise, without intervention, is eventually going to flood communities in the back bay,” said Rob Freudenberg, the vice president of energy and environment programs at the Regional Plan Association, a civic organization that looks at how to improve the quality of life in the tri-state area. “There is a chance to live with flooding in the Rockaways, but it will look different.” 

The oceanside of the peninsula is also particularly vulnerable to coastal storm surge, an issue that became extremely clear during Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the area. Afterwards, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began an initiative to place an estimated 3.5 million cubic yards of sand onto the ocean side of the Rockaways to restore the coastline and bolster flood mitigation. 

Since 2020, the Corps has also placed 14 groins—stone structures that help limit coastal erosion—on the beach, and are working on reinforcing a stretch of sand dunes on the water-facing side. The reinforcement will add cores of steel, rock and concrete to the structure.

Danieu said RISE’s restoration efforts work in tandem with the Corps, with native plants as a complement to the infrastructure upgrades. 

Far from the dunes, on the bayside where the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy  works, marshland is being eroded by a combination of sea level rise and storms. Diminishing marshland undercuts natural flood protection, conservationists point out, and the hope is to stabilize the marsh.

“I lived in the community before Sandy, and I think anybody that has gone through a natural disaster will understand that the community is fiercely protective of what it means to live here,” said Elizabeth Stoehr, the deputy director of the nonprofit Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy. 

“Living in such a coastal environment is pretty hard. It’s cold, wet, streets flood, people’s basements flood, people are moving their cars at high tide events,” she said. “We would only do this if the effort was worth it.”

Stoehr and DuPont said their nonprofits have worked with Rockaways neighborhoods which include public housing and a large number of low-income residents. 

“When Storm Sandy hit and when Covid hit, we were one of the only organizations that were there and able to serve the community,” DuPont said. “We’re not just there to plant sand dunes. We really have been there to help in terms of health, wellness, connecting people to resources for health care or for food.”

Beaches as Tools for Climate Resilience

Coastal sand dunes are dynamic landforms. They need three things to form: sand, wind to move the sand and plants to keep the sand in place. 

“[Dunes] have this ability to trap sand and continue to grow on top of themselves and increase in sand volume and height and elevation over time,” said Karina Johnston, a doctoral student at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “They can provide this living, growing buffer of sand protection from waves and flooding.”

Johnston is a member of the California Coastal Dune Science Network, which connects scientists examining how dunes can bolster coastal resilience. In a 2023 study in Southern California, Johnston found dunes thrived with limited maintenance if weeding and replanting were implemented. 

“The whole process is a little bit of a culture shift to start thinking about beaches, not just in terms of recreation, but also in terms of their protective capacity to be more resilient to climate impacts and sea level rise,” Johnston said. 

The dune restoration effort in the Rockaways aims for such a result. RISE has worked with eDesign Dynamics, an environmental engineering firm, to create a coastal resilience plan to help frame its operations.  

Though eDesign Dynamics engineers rarely work on dunes, they often work on projects focused on habitat restoration and climate resilience. Since Hurricane Sandy, senior partner Eric Rothstein said its engineers  have been more focused on how habitat can thrive with new flood protection structures. 

There are choices to make, he said, when considering beach conservation. Rothstein said he often asks, “What do you do when the driver is habitat versus what do you do when the driver is flood protection.”

In Rockaway, the engineers identified the most vulnerable areas of the beach and explained how the community could bolster protections.

For a small operation like RISE, such resilience planning is essential—and EPA has upended a timely effort and opportunity to prepare for climate change, DuPont said.  

“It just feels like nobody’s really listening,” she said.

Correction: This story was updated June 9, 2025, to correct the name of the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy.