Page 1189 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 2 April 2019
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Opportunities for improvement were identified by the independent evaluator as well as by exercise participants and the exercise control team. Areas for attention include: the provision of information inside the evacuation centre to evacuees, staff, and volunteers; caring for unaccompanied children; and streamlining our forms for disaster assistance payments. The ACT government and our community partners will work continuously to improve our procedures and operations.
In addition to the work of community partners and the ACT government, individual Canberra households are also being encouraged and supported to prepare for more frequent disasters. Survival and recovery depends on individual preparations and the decisions people make.
Preparing bushfire survival plans and building support networks to assist each other—especially for vulnerable people such as the elderly, disabled, and young children—are key to building a resilient Canberra. Together, well prepared households, highly capable community partners, and ACT government agencies are well positioned to cope with a more dangerous future that we know will increase with climate change.
In my other role as Minister for City Services we are continuing our focus on planting more trees around the capital. This autumn we are planting over 400 trees in Canberra. We will continue that approach to make sure that we retain our canopy, particularly some of our ageing groups of trees coming to the end of their life, and keep the character of our bush capital.
We know that trees make our capital a cooler place, often up to ten degrees cooler in areas with shade, and that helps us to adapt to climate change. We want to encourage the broader community to also plant more trees around Canberra to increase our resilience and adaptation to climate change in the future.
Of course severe weather events sometimes cause branches to fall from trees around the capital. We have had several of those even since I have become minister in August last year and our arborists in Transport and City Services have had to work very keenly to clear up a lot of fallen branches from the streets around Canberra. That is something we expect to increase over time and so we will need to continue to consider how we adapt to climate change, particularly in making sure that we retain our fantastic tree canopy.
I know that Minister Rattenbury is continuing his publicly stated commitment to develop a living infrastructure plan, and I look forward to working with him on how we can make sure we increase and retain our fantastic tree canopy in Canberra.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Corrections and Justice Health, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety and Minister for Mental Health) (3.50): It is imperative that the ACT be prepared for more extreme weather events because of climate change, which is the topic of today’s discussion. Certainly, the ACT has been a leader in addressing climate change and playing our part as global citizens. In 2012 we set in legislation
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