Central Puget Sound Regional Open Space Strategy: Illuminating the value of open space in advancing urban sustainability

The Puget Sound faces significant ecological and economic pressures, which will be further exacerbated by the increasing intensity of climate change impacts. These stresses affect water quality and supply, fish, farm and forest production, flood and other environmental hazard vulnerability, biodiversity, economic opportunities, and overall quality of life. Additionally, not all of the region’s people equitably share the health, recreational, and aesthetic benefits open spaces provide. It is essential to more fully account for the value of green infrastructure provided by open space systems and position it alongside other foundational investments such as transportation or education as a necessary dedication of public and private resources to shape future development and ensure community well-being. Actions must be coordinated at the regional level. Ecological systems, in particular, must be considered at the watershed scale, and protecting threatened rural and resource lands, public health, and community development require inter-jurisdictional solutions.The Regional Open Space Strategy (ROSS) is an effort to address this need and to conserve and enhance open space systems that contribute to the ecological, economic, social, recreational, and aesthetic vitality of the Central Puget Sound. The effectiveness of the numerous ongoing conservation efforts in the region can be greatly enhanced by directing added resources to the most critical priorities and supporting individual efforts through cooperative approaches to shared challenges. The ROSS seeks to stitch together and foster more effective collaboration among the many conservation activities underway by gathering key experts and building social capital around cross-cutting challenges such as health, social equity, economic development, climate change, and biodiversity. This requires a concerted investment in new metrics and new conceptions of both the benefits and the tradeoffs that are made in conservation when evaluated against these broader challenges. The ROSS seeks to create a robust, diverse, accessible, and connected regional open space system by adjusting to and even reinforcing other community objectives and more effectively illustrating how communities benefit from investments in natural green infrastructure