Action Agenda:  Initial Strategic Priorities

Priority A: Ensure that activities and funding are focused on the most urgent and important problems facing the Sound.

Our existing fragmented and uncoordinated approach cannot keep up with the problems and conditions we face now and in the future with expected population growth and climate changes. We will need to realign the existing work including better use of existing tools and new tools.

Priority B: Protect the intact ecosystem processes that sustain Puget Sound.

Protection of existing functional upland and marine ecosystem processes is critical for maintaining wildlife habitat, flows of fresh water, groundwater infiltration and controlling the volume and composition of stormwater runoff. Protection of ecosystem processes is less expensive and more effective than trying to repair or recreate damaged areas. Critical to our ability to protect resources will be encouraging density in urban areas, protecting rural working lands, and avoiding sprawl.

Priority C: Restore ecosystem processes that will sustain Puget Sound.

While protecting ecosystem processes and functions is crucial to achieving a healthy Puget Sound, restoration is necessary to realize that goal and sustain it into the future. Restoring Puget Sound means undertaking restoration at a much larger scale, taking into account sequence, habitat-forming processes, and reconnection of isolated patches of habitat.

Priority D: Prevent the sources of water pollution.

Water pollution threatens our health, impacts many of the species that make up the web of life in Puget Sound, and diminishes our quality of life. We need to keep toxic, nutrient, and pathogen pollutants out of our water, fish, and shellfish in the first place. Improved stormwater practices such as low impact development, retrofitting and advanced technology for wastewater treatment should be implemented that will address both the volume of polluted water and the pollutants themselves.