Harte Research Institute and its two partners, Harwell Gentile & Associates and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, are working together to develop a comprehensive "Report Card" to help gauge the health of the Gulf of Mexico's ecosystems.

The Gulf of Mexico Ecosystem Report Card Framework will be rolled out at the State of the 2011 State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit to be held at the Omni Galleria in Houston December 4-8. Organized by HRI, the Summit will be a critical meeting of about 400 Gulf scientists, managers and leaders.

The Report Card will provide the scientific information and understanding necessary to evaluate the health of the Gulf, to clearly demonstrate how well it is or is not progressing towards desired long-term goals, and to inform decision makers on the policies and resources needed to achieve sustainability of a healthy Gulf of Mexico. The project will provide a scientific, graphical representation of the Gulf's current environmental condition. It will be organized into different sections and provide separate reports for each of the various regions and habitats of the Gulf ecosystem.

When fully developed, the Report Card will be made available to a wide variety of people, from the highest levels of decision makers to the most detailed scientific investigators to the general public.

When President Obama announced the formation of the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force on October 5, 2010, he said that within one year “the Task Force shall prepare a strategy that proposes a Gulf Coast ecosystem restoration agenda, including goals for ecosystem restoration, development of a set of performance indicators to track progress, and means of coordinating intergovernmental restoration efforts guided by shared priorities.” The Report Card will act as a performance indicator to help evaluate this new Gulf Coast restoration program.

Because of the Gulf's scale and complexity, achieving a healthy and sustainable Gulf of Mexico will require an extensive, sustained national effort that addresses not only the consequences of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill and the suite of recent devastating hurricanes, but also the myriad of other impacts on the Gulf from human activities, including:

• increased nutrients and chemicals that flow into the Gulf from the watershed that drains more than half of the continental US, including America’s agricultural heartland
• rapidly expanding development of cities and industry fueled by energy, transportation, tourism and other major industries
• harmful invasive species that have spread across the region
• pervasive consequences of global climate change, including the specter of rapidly rising sea levels along highly vulnerable coastlines.

The scientific information included in the Report Card can become a valuable tool for guiding environmental management, research, policy making and ecosystem restoration. As the Report Card is updated over the years, patterns of pressures and impacts will emerge, providing insight into how successful policies have been in accomplishing their goals.