A Blueprint for Cape Cod’s Future: The 2025 Regional Policy Plan

The 2025 Regional Policy Plan (RPP) serves as the foundation for local and regional planning and regulation across Cape Cod. The RPP guides development and resource protection, balancing Cape Cod’s natural, built, and community systems.

For the past year, the Commission has been engaged in a process to update this document, holding public hearings, stakeholder meetings, and focus groups, and conducting surveys, to ensure it aligns with the region's needs.

Since the last RPP was adopted, Cape Cod has experienced profound change. The COVID-19 pandemic brought new residents and heightened demand for the region’s natural spaces, intensifying long-standing pressures on housing, infrastructure, and the environment.

At the same time, the region has made significant strides: advancing hundreds of millions of dollars in wastewater infrastructure, completing the first Climate Action Plan and Regional Housing Strategy, expanding monitoring of freshwater resources, and continuing to update transportation and economic development plans. These achievements reflect a region actively working to address its vulnerabilities while planning for long-term resilience.

The 2025 RPP builds on this progress, outlining goals and objectives that reflect the interconnected nature of Cape Cod’s systems. It emphasizes protecting the region’s sensitive natural resources, directing development to areas with appropriate infrastructure, supporting climate adaptation and mitigation, expanding housing opportunities, strengthening the local economy, and preserving the region’s cultural and historic character.

The Plan reinforces the need for coordinated regional action to meet emerging challenges, including climate impacts, housing affordability, infrastructure needs, and economic shifts, and sets the framework for how towns, regional partners, and the Commission can work together toward shared outcomes.

To move these goals into action, the RPP identifies a series of Commission-led planning and regulatory initiatives, from developing a regional open space plan and advancing aquifer protection work to supporting local climate planning, updating historic inventories, improving transportation safety, and assisting towns in implementing new state housing tools. Across all areas of work, the RPP stresses collaboration, public engagement, and the continued tracking of progress to ensure Cape Cod is moving toward its long-term vision of vibrant, healthy communities and protected natural and cultural resources.

The Cape Cod Commission approved the updated RPP in October, and it has now been adopted by the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates and Board of Regional Commissioners as a county ordinance.