States surrounding the Chesapeake Bay and the Trump administration signed a new agreement Tuesday to restore the estuary, recommitting to a historic pollution plan first penned in 2010.
In a jovial ceremony at the National Aquarium in Baltimore that emphasized unity and bipartisanship, representatives from EPA and Maryland, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and Washington announced the revamped Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement.
The plan represents both a lifeline for the nation’s largest estuary and an admission that one of the nation’s most ambitious proposals to reduce pollution hasn’t reached its full potential. While the bay’s health has generally improved over the past decade, states did not meet crucial agreed-to targets for reducing nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment pollution flows by 2025.
The agreement reaffirms the importance of those reductions to sustaining aquatic life and protecting human health. It sets a new deadline of 2040 for when pollution caps must be met.
