Despite past successes in restoring water, air and wildlife, Connecticut residents will fail to achieve their environmental goals unless there is greater and more sustained effort.

Connecticut’s citizens have set goals that are both challenging and realistic:

• healthful air every day
• sewage-free waters
• conservation of farms, fields, forests and beaches
• a sustainable future where materials are recycled and energy is used efficiently.

These goals are within reach. However, the trends depicted on the following pages are not encouraging. Progress has slowed. Connecticut is not on track to achieve its goals:

• Farmland preservation has been so slow that, if current trends continue, the farms actually will be gone before the money becomes available to preserve the land, and the goal will never be reached.
  
  
• To meet its goal of conserving 21% of the natural landscape by 2023, Connecticut must secure more than 10,000 acres per year. In 2005 and 2006, the combined efforts of cities, towns, nonprofit land conservation organizations and the state preserved about 6,000 acres per year.
  
  
• There is no specific goal for forests, but they are losing ground after a century of growth and stability.
  
  
• Prospects for Long Island Sound are unclear. With substantial investment in sewage treatment plants, Connecticut met short-term goals for removing nitrogen from sewage. The condition of the Sound has improved but hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the water) continues.  Hypoxia is expected to persist at least through 2014, the year that Connecticut and New York have pledged to meet their ultimate nitrogen-removal goals. Beach closings have been fairly constant and lobsters hit a new low in 2006.
  
  
• Sewage affects more than the Sound. About 80 miles of rivers, 270 square miles of harbors and hundreds of basements receive untreated waste from overflowing sewers. This report shows how slowly the problem is being corrected. Elimination of these sewage overflows will take many decades if recent rates of funding continue.
  
  
• After a strong start in the early 1990s, recycling leveled off and stagnated at a level well below the statutory goal, with significant consequences. The Department of Environmental Protection adopted a Solid Waste Management Plan in December 2006 that illustrates the need for a far greater rate of recycling and waste reduction. Hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage are being trucked out of state. Most recycling, while cost effective in comparison to disposal, requires a stimulus of public funds to drive up participation.
  
  
• State agencies are projecting continued increases in population, new land development, traffic and electricity consumption, all of which work against the state’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2010. (Greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases that contribute to global warming.) Despite the state’s active participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the voluntary actions of many citizens, businesses and local governments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the projections above put the state’s goal in serious jeopardy.