The Connecticut Environmental Protection Act enshrines your environmental rights, giving everyone the ability to intervene to stop pollution and keep our neighborhoods healthy and safe.
In an era when the federal government is attacking environmental protections across the country, state laws are a critical defense shielding our natural resources from pollution and reckless development.
Watch our new video about CEPA
You have the right to raise environmental concerns to our state agencies.
CEPA guarantees your environmental rights in three simple steps:
- It gives everyone the ability to intervene in state and local administrative hearings, permitting proceedings, and other processes to raise genuine environmental and environmental justice issues.
- It states that agencies MUST consider those issues in their decision-making.
- It ensures that agencies may not authorize conduct that will unreasonably pollute, impair, or destroy natural resources.
CEPA is the backbone of Connecticut’s long-standing tradition of environmental protection. It says that the air, water and natural resources belong to us all, and gives everyone the right to intervene when those resources are at risk.
What has CEPA accomplished?
CEPA has been used to protect some of the most iconic open spaces in Connecticut from poorly planned development.
It was instrumental in conserving the 1,000-acre coastal forest now known as The Preserve in Old Saybrook and to halt unreasonably dense and polluting development in the Oswegatchie Hills in East Lyme. CEPA was also used to stop a proposed condo development on Milford Point, which would have destroyed a vital bird migration site and left the condos vulnerable to flooding from sea level rise, and more recently to stop the expansion of a transfer station in the Annex residential neighborhood of New Haven, which is one of the most environmentally over-burdened neighborhoods in the state.
CEPA could be at risk this session; here’s why it should be preserved.
CEPA has repeatedly faced rollback attempts which would weaken your environmental rights and dismantle critical protections at a time when we should be strengthening them. CEPA ensures that every resident has a voice in decisions that affect their health, safety, and environment. Stay tuned for our calls to action so we can work together to defend Connecticut’s clean water, healthy air, and thriving ecosystems.