Solutions

Maryland’s Strategies and Actions to Restore the Chesapeake Bay

Working together, the citizens, businesses, and local, state and federal governments in the watershed, can make real progress in restoring the Chesapeake Bay, but we need everyone doing their part to make it happen. We’ve set specific goals for reducing pollution, restoring habitats and fostering smarter, greener growth and living in Maryland. BayStat will track our success in meeting these goals.

Tracking Maryland's Tributary Strategies In 2007, Maryland developed specific strategies for restoring each river, the Statewide Tributary Strategies Implementation Plan. This plan is designed to identify all the actions that Maryland needs to implement in order to reach our total Bay Restoration Goals by 2020. You can track our success in implementing best practices for managing and limiting the environmental impact of our actions outlined in the plan here. The plan also includes specific wildlife and fisheries habitat restoration goals for wetlands, forests, stream and river buffers and shorelines.

Tracking Maryland's Two-Year Milestones While Maryland has been successful at implementing actions toward our ultimate Bay Restoration goal, those actions have not been implemented at a pace necessary to reach our goal by 2020. To address this, in 2009 Governor O’Malley directed State agencies to develop “2-Year Milestones” to be completed by the end of 2011. This first set of 2-Year Milestones will put Maryland on a greatly accelerated pace needed to meet our ultimate goal by 2020, and will be followed with subsequent, accelerated 2-Year Milestones. The advantage of this approach is that it holds ourselves accountable for near term actions, not future generations. You can track our progress at implementing this first set of 2-Year Milestones.