All National Estuary Programs (NEPs) are required under Clean Water Act §320 to develop a Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP). These documents demonstrate the NEP model of adaptive management, enabling and facilitating a continual process of integrating new data and results into ongoing decision making and actions. MassBays’ Blueprint for the Bays is our CCMP and includes details of the goals we have set out for ourselves for the next ten years. 

The Blueprint for the Bays represents ten years of planning, public input, and stakeholder reviews. It highlights our past accomplishments and recognizes where we must do more or do things differently. New areas include heightened focus on impacts and responses to climate change, and the need for greater inclusiveness in decision-making to genuinely address concerns for environmental justice. The Blueprint also provides a clearer description of MassBays’ role in the Commonwealth’s rich and varied environmental community. 

We look forward to working with partners across the Bays – at the local, state, and federal levels – to implement this comprehensive plan. We have designed this plan to ensure that our collective investments of time, money, and expertise will be directed to priority challenges and concrete results. We invite any and all to join us in this effort to bring new research to inform resource management, invest in new tools for decision makers, encourage and enable practical actions by individuals and institutions, and steer communities toward investments that result in restored and resilient ecosystems.