2025 - 2026

Maryland has committed to rapidly expanding the production of renewable energy – including solar – while also maintaining strong commitments to land conservation and farmland preservation. While these priorities are not inherently incompatible, they do create practical questions about where renewable energy infrastructure should be located, how agricultural land should be protected, and whether new models of shared land use can help reduce conflict.

2026

Following a successful partnership with the 2025 workshop, Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) Department of Sustainability and Resilience (DSR) partnered with EFC to design and deliver PGCPS’s 3rd Annual Sustainability and Climate Leadership Summit at the Patuxent Research Refuge’s National Wildlife Visitor Center in Laurel, MD.

2026

Delaware’s ocean and bay waters have competing uses that increase the urgency for marine spatial planning that incorporates data in decision making. The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) is developing a Delaware Ocean and Bay Plan to guide resource use, management, and conservation of marine waters off Delaware’s coast.

2020 - 2022

The University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center (UMD EFC) partnered with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC EFC) to deliver integrated water planning assistance to communities. Assistance was delivered through webinars, office hours, and case study development with support from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Water.

The Environmental Finance Center worked with two Maryland communities—the cities of Annapolis and Salisbury— to evaluate their readiness to invest in climate resilience and to develop guidance to help communities lay the groundwork for effective resilience funding.  The project included conducting a crosswalk of each community's key planning and policy documents, evaluating whether the communities have in place key enabling conditions for resilience investment, and developing self-assessment questions that municipalities may use to determine their readiness to inves

2020

EFC worked with partners in the Delaware River Basin to develop a proposal for an upcoming Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) funding opportunity. This process included reviewing the original Delaware Basin RCPP project, providing comments to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) on new RCPP rules, identifying and engaging stakeholders, assessing stakeholder capacity and project feasibility, and developing an implementation plan.

2006

The Environmental Finance Center, through the support of the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, launched the Delaware River Watershed Innovative Financing Strategy Project.  The EFC and its project partners convened an expert environmental financing panel and identified innovative and scalable options for financing Delaware River watershed restoration and protection efforts.  The panel’s work resulted in a financing strategy that enabled the William Penn Foundation and its funding partners to allocate capital and funding in a way that is catalytic and ultimately successf

The EPA is developing training materials for environmental watershed planners and hazard mitigation specialists at the state and local level to demonstrate the link between water quality protection, watershed planning, source water protection, and hazard mitigation programs. The materials will help professionals engaged in this work better understand how the concepts are related and can enhance planning efforts and improve outcomes when performed together.

2018 (June)

Over the past three decades, billions of federal, state, and local dollars have been deployed to support water infrastructure projects and other programs that reduce point and nonpoint sources of pollution to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

2016-2020

Community-enabled Lifecycle Analysis of Stormwater Infrastructure Costs (CLASIC) is a collaborative effort between seven institutions looking at green and gray infrastructure alternatives for stormwater. The four-year project (2016-2020) was funded at $2M by USEPA under National Priorities: Life Cycle Costs of Water Infrastructure Alternatives grant.