Skip to main content

Challenges for a sustainable Minnesota: a Minnesota strategic plan for sustainable development

Challenges for a Sustainable Minnesota draft report discusses how best to pursue sustainable development in Minnesota. The document offers a vision, new decision-making principles and six strategies for achieving sustainable development:

  • Align Minnesota's economic incentives and goals
  • Understand what is environmentally sustainable
  • Integrate natural resources management
  • Advance sustainable land use and community development policies
  • Ask government to take the first steps
  • Focus research on sustainable development issues

  • Taking root: state agency efforts toward sustainable development in Minnesota

    In 1996, the Minnesota Legislature directed all agencies, departments and boards to report on how their respective missions and programs “reflect and implement the state sustainable development principles” or how they could be changed to do so. This report summarizes the results, compiled and analyzed by Minnesota Planning staff for the Environmental Quality Board.

    Economics and incentives: a committee report of the Round Table on Sustainable Developement

    Helping businesses adopt sustainable practices and challenging them to help society take strides toward sustainable development should be among Minnesota’s chief economic goals, recommends the Economics and Incentives Committee of the Minnesota Round Table on Sustainable Development. Long-term economic prosperity depends upon the acceptance of these responsibilities by businesses, governments and, ultimately, consumers.

    The committee calls upon Minnesota businesses, trade associations, educational institutions and government to:

    Action plan on sustainable development for Minnesota state government : areport to the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board by a working group of the Sustainable Communities Partnership

    Over the past several years, the Sustainable Development Initiative has fostered some significant shifts in policy, yielded a large number of recommendations for additional policy change and raised the general level of awareness about the goal and benefits of sustainable development. During this time, interest in more sustainable forms of development has grown at the community level, among many businesses and in the Legislature, as well as around the world.