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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY September 2000 through August 2001 has been an exciting, yet challenging, 12 months for the North Carolina Million Acre Initiative. News of the Initiative and the successes of its many land protection partners has been common in the media of our state and has periodically been noted and acclaimed outside our borders as well. Support for open space protection and reaching the goal of protecting an additional million acres of open spaces remains high across the State, and the foundation for accelerated land protection in North Carolina is in place. A look at the numbers of acres protected, though, reveals that we are not yet on course for reaching our million -acre land protection goal. There are two primary reasons for this: Money is the primary factor in determining the rate at which we protect land in North Carolina. While existing state trust funds meet many of the critical needs of our land protection entities, the present combined federal, state, local, and private expenditures for land protection in North Carolina will not allow the state to reach the million acre - o al by 2009. It is clear that the state's budget situation makes it a difficult time to appropriate more revenues to land protection activities. It is also clear that until the land protection partners of North Carolina identify new sources of money for land protection, we will continue to fall short of the number of acres we need to protect each year. The Million Acre Initiative is a new program. Our initial steps in the implementation of the Million Acre Initiative have been spent developing program goals and policies, implementation strategies, standardized procedures, information systems, and many other program components that allow us to turn our desire to protect open spaces into a functioning initiative to get it done. Over the past two years, divisions within DENR have increased their permanently protected land holdings by approximately 15.5 percent. These same entities are working together with other land protection partners to develop statewide land protection strategies and locally driven implementation plans, making sure we protect a network of lands essential for water quality and natural area protection, recreational opportunities, cultural and historic preservation, economic prosperity, and flood hazard mitigation. We are working diligently to develop a sound land protection initiative that is poised to makimize the use of additional resources when they become available. As we continue to protect essential open spaces across the state - in big cities, small towns, and in the rural countryside - we must also address the great need for a state -led educational campaign that focuses on how permanently protected open space in every community is essential for maximizing quality of life. Helping the general public understand the ecological, economic, and social importance of protecting open space will be an important step forward in reaching North Carolina's land protection goals. 1)