Gov. Edwards Establishes Task Force Focused on Restoring and Enhancing Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin Gov. John Bel Edwards signed an executive order creating the Atchafalaya River Basin Restoration and Enhancement (ARBRE) Task Force to address long-standing issues in the basin and raise public awareness of the critical nature of these concerns. Posted: Dec 14, 2020 2:07 PM Posted By: Akemi Briggs BATON ROUGE — Gov. John Bel Edwards signed an executive order creating the Atchafalaya River Basin Restoration and Enhancement (ARBRE) Task Force to address long-standing issues in the basin and raise public awareness of the critical nature of these concerns. “The irony of the Atchafalaya Basin is that while it is suffering from an abundance of sediment, the rest of our coast is experiencing a severe sediment deficit,” said Gov. Edwards. “The basin’s stressors are not only harming water quality and the environment but also threatening the capacity of the basin to carry flood waters from the Mississippi and Red Rivers safely and effectively. The basin is the nation’s largest river-basin swamp with a rich ecology, and it is past time that it receive more focused attention here in Louisiana and nationally.”