Submission on Draft Urban Greening Strategy
Our submission highlights the importance of tree protection legislation, integrating biodiversity-sensitive urban design and building capacity for water sensitive urban design.
Metropolitan councils already lead the way in urban greening across our suburbs in parks, open spaces and along streets. Cross-sector collaboration is needed to create sustainable and healthy environments for communities.
The State Government has an opportunity through the Urban Greening Strategy to demonstrate leadership by increasing green infrastructure and improving greening equity across our metropolitan suburbs.
LGA has previously called for the creation of a new healthy greening fund to support councils in the delivery of the government’s canopy targets and to facilitate increased undergrounding of powerlines which cause conflict with tree canopies.
The overall aim should be to enhance urban green cover, climate resilience, and community wellbeing through a collaborative approach.
Key recommendations
Recommendations contained in our submission to the draft Urban Greening Strategy are:
- Introduce user-friendly tools and capacity-building measures to make exceeding minimum greening standards easy and attractive for developers.
- Identify cost-effective solutions to remove barriers and incentivise positive action to ensure the urban tree canopy is not at cross-purposes with the current tree planting offset scheme.
- Showcase best-practice green and blue infrastructure along active transport corridors, in major land releases, schools and other government lands.
- Improve legislation to recognise the value of trees in government systems and policy, including their contribution to reduce urban heat islands and improving community wellbeing.
- Encourage biodiverse plantings, through legislation and policy measures, to ensure urban green spaces are aesthetically pleasing, functional and provide habitat – improving air and water quality.
In addition to the recommendations, we provisionally support the proposal to introduce a new conservation agreement, noting these would have the ability to be term limited.
Next steps
LGA’s submission calls for a balanced approach which enhances urban greening efforts while addressing practical and economic challenges. This includes legislative protections for trees.
There must continue to be strong collaboration between state and local governments to implement best-practice green infrastructure and improve greening equity across Metropolitan Adelaide.
LGA will seek to continue working with the State Government on these recommendations to support metropolitan councils as they continue to deliver liveable and greener suburbs for their communities.
Read the LGA submission to the Draft Urban Greening Strategy.