New Jersey's Sustainable State Project represents the first effort of this scale within the United States to achieve sustainability on a statewide basis. New Jersey's Efforts To date, the most comprehensive effort we have made in New Jersey to achieve sustainable development is the State Development and Redevelopment Plan. While not binding on municipalities, the State Plan's strength comes from its use by state government in regulatory and investment decision-making. To complement the plan's emphasis on protecting open space and encouraging appropriate development, New Jersey voters in November 1998 approved the expenditure of funds to protect approximately half of the state' s remaining open land from development by the year 2010. A sustainable state cannot be achieved without tackling land use.
Land use is at the heart of many environmental, social and economic issues facing the state.
Learning to recognize such linkages between the economic, social and environmental impacts of our decisions is the essence of sustainable living. The Sustainable State Project New Jersey policy makers got their first look at sustainable development efforts in action with a 1994 fact-finding trip to the Netherlands. There, Whitman administration officials, members of the Legislature and representatives from non-governmental organizations saw firsthand the Netherlands' success in building consensus around goals and involving business and private citizens in the realization of those goals. One result is that major corporations and environmental regulators in Holland were able to reach broad agreements, or covenants, containing new strategies for reaching broadly accepted environmental goals. In follow-up to the trip, the State of New Jersey and New Jersey Future hosted the first Sustainable State Leadership Conference in May 1995 at Princeton University.