Barack Obama is expected on Wednesday to visit Everglades national park in southern Florida, where administration officials say concerns about changing temperatures and rising sea levels offer the perfect backdrop for the administration to raise an alarm about climate change on Earth Day 2015.



Even before the president embarked on the trip, however, the White House found itself answering questions about how it looks politically for Obama to stage a major presidential appearance on environmental issues in the backyard of two potentially strong Republican presidential candidates who have expressed skepticism about climate change.



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The sense of a building political skirmish was stoked by a pre-emptive attack against the president’s visit by Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, himself a climate change skeptic. Scott released a statement on Tuesday criticizing Obama for failing to “live up to his commitment on the Everglades and find a way to fund the $58m in backlog funding Everglades national park hasn’t received from the federal government”.



White House spokesman Josh Earnest sharply objected to Scott’s attack in a conference call with reporters late Tuesday, noting repeatedly that Scott’s office had reportedly banned state employees from using the phrase “climate change” in educational material and other official documents.



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“The president’s commitment to the Everglades, and fighting climate change, is one that stacks up very well against Governor Scott, particularly when you consider that Governor Scott has outlawed employees of the state of Florida from even uttering the words climate change,” Earnest said. “So it’s a little rich for somebody who’s made that declaration, to suggest that somehow the president has not been sufficiently committed [to fighting climate change].”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama’s Everglades visit highlights the equivocal views on climate change of Florida politicians Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, who are expected to contest the Republican nomination. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

The skirmish between the president and Scott played out against the broader political backdrop of the 2016 presidential race, in which the former Florida governor Jeb Bush and current Florida senator Marco Rubio are expected to vie for the Republican nomination. Bush said he thought climate change may be real but then claimed wrongly that there is a disagreement in the scientific community about the issue. Rubio has sought to punt on the issue by saying he is not a scientist.



Rubio has announced a 2016 presidential bid, while Bush, the brother of George Bush and son of George HW Bush, has built a robust network of donors and advisers, and is expected to announce a bid later this spring.



The Everglades, a 1.5m-acre estuary of delicate and shifting ecological equilibrium, has been uniquely affected by climate change. The loss of inland fresh water to rising temperatures has allowed more salt water to move in, while rising sea levels have further injected seawater into breeding grounds and other areas that produce the national park’s unique flora and fauna. The encroaching saltwater has also threatened the state’s drinking water supply.



Obama was expected to visit areas of the Everglades where increasing concentrations of salt water had killed the park’s iconic grass and changing temperatures had altered the growth patterns of the park’s mangroves trees, the White House said. It will be Obama’s first visit as president to the national park.



The president’s trip was meant to “highlight the value of special and vulnerable places like the Everglades”, said Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House council on environmental equality. She said the Obama administration had invested more than $2.2bn to protect the Everglades, and on the occasion of Earth Day would release a new report showing that every $1 of federal money invested in the national park system returned $10 to the US economy in the form of tourism and other benefits.



“The Everglades is one of the country’s most unique landscapes and climate change is putting this treasured ecosystem at risk,” Goldfuss said. “This is really ground zero. Rising sea levels lead to shoreline erosion and increased flooding, and as the seas rise, salty ocean water travels inland and threatens the primary source of drinking water for more than a third of Floridians.”

“My expectations are not great – actually [I have] no expectations for funding America’s Everglades projects as part of Everglades Restoration,” said Doug Young, president of the south Florida Audubon Society and a member of the Broward County climate change task force. “But I think it is fantastic that on the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, President Obama is visiting the Everglades and talking about climate change and sea level rise. I would like to think that this is partly due to the Rick Scott and Marco Rubio climate change denial.”



In addition to hosting one of the country’s most fragile and celebrated conservation areas, Florida hosts one of the most unpredictable electorates. Victory in the state by a Republican or by a Democratic candidate such as Hillary Clinton, whose campaign is making climate change a central issue, could mean the difference in the race for the White House.



But in the call with reporters Tuesday, the White House pushed back against the notion that the president’s descent on Florida had a political edge.



“This is not an effort necessarily to go to anybody’s home state,” Earnest said. “This is an effort to raise this debate. And the truth is that those Republicans that choose to deny the reality of climate change, they do that to the detriment of people they’re elected to represent.”