The 2012/2013 Action Agenda for Puget Sound
The Puget Sound Action Agenda lays out the work needed to protect and restore Puget Sound into the future. It is intended to drive investment and action. The 2012 Action Agenda is the result of over a year of work with state and federal agencies, tribal governments, local governments, representatives of the business and environmental caucuses, and other interested partners. It builds on the first Action Agenda, created in 2008, and progress since then.
Introduction
The Action Agenda is not a regulatory document; it does not establish regulatory requirements. It is a leadership and coordinating document, meant to focus the region around a shared agenda for Puget Sound recovery.
The Action Agenda is organized into five Sections.
Section 1 is the Context for Recovery. It describes the 2020 recovery targets, the current state of Puget Sound relative to each target, and climate change projections.
Section 2 describes the 2012/2013 priorities for the Action Agenda, the three Strategic Initiatives, which are:
- Prevention of pollution from urban stormwater runoff – we have many of the tools we need to do this but need the capacity to ramp up efforts; we must stop contaminating Puget Sound;
- Protection and restoration of habitat – we must save the best of the habitat that we have left;
- Recovery of shellfish beds – shellfish health begins on land through reduction of pollution from rural and agricultural lands and maintenance and repair of failing septic tanks.
Section 3 is the heart of the Action Agenda. It describes the strategies, sub-strategies, ongoing program activities, and near-term actions needed to protect and recover Puget Sound, as well as future opportunities. This section includes an overview of how the strategies and actions were developed, discussions of the roles of science and climate change, and a description of the ongoing process to develop a ranked list of Action Agenda sub-strategies. Strategies and Actions are divided into five categories:
- Freshwater and Terrestrial Protection and Restoration, which includes strategies and actions related to land development and restoration, stewardship of working forest and agriculture lands, floodplains, salmon recovery, and freshwater flows;
- Marine and Nearshore Protection and Restoration, which includes strategies and actions related to shoreline protection, alteration, and restoration; marine area protection and restoration; working waterfronts and public access; and biodiversity and invasive species;
- Pollution Prevention and Cleanup, which includes strategies related to reducing toxic threats, polluted runoff from urban and rural lands, wastewater management, shellfish bed restoration, oil spill preparedness, and clean up;
- Strategic Leadership and Collaboration, which includes much of the core work of the Puget Sound Partnership agency, as well as some partners, including strategies related to setting priorities, performance management, science and ecosystem monitoring, and promoting stewardship;
- Funding Strategy, which describes how increased financial capacity to implement priority ongoing and new actions in the Action Agenda can be achieved through identifying new sources of funding, using existing funding more strategically and efficiently, and developing innovative, market-based programs.
Section 4 contains local profiles and local strategies and actions. Local strategies and actions also are incorporated throughout Section 3, nested within the relevant Puget Sound-wide sub-strategies.
Section 5 contains five appendices.
Appendix A provides logic models or “results chains” of each of the strategies included in the A-C sections;
Appendix B provides an overview of the Puget Sound National Estuary Program Management Conference;
Appendix C provides a table of all Near-Term Actions in the Action Agenda;
Appendix D provides an overview of the science basis of the Action Agenda;
Appendix E provides a glossary of acronyms, terms, and definitions;
Appendix F provides a Federal Response – Habitat Matrix; and Appendix G provides the Action Agenda Sub-Strategy Rankings.
Finally, there are two companion documents to the 2012/2013 Action Agenda. Highlights from the 2012/2013 Action Agenda, including the Strategic Initiatives, can be found in The Action Agenda for Puget Sound: Highlights of the 2012/2013 Action Agenda. Priority science actions are described in the Action Agenda’s companion document, Priority Science for Restoring and Protecting Puget Sound: A Biennial Science Work Plan for 2011-2013. It provides a strategic focus on the science needed to recover and protect Puget Sound.
