Page 4305 - Week 12 - Thursday, 24 October 2019
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To support these ambitious and important goals, earlier this year the ACT government committed to planting 17,000 trees on public land between now and 2023. This is the most significant investment in Canberra’s urban forest this century. We will prioritise planting trees where shade and cooling are most valuable, such as along nature strips and adjacent to paths and cycleways that link to schools, community facilities and shopping centres. Species selection will take into account climate projections as well as a range of other factors.
As another example of our commitment to maintain a healthy and resilient urban forest the ACT government is developing our urban forest strategy in close collaboration with other managers of Canberra’s urban forest. The strategy will provide a framework for decision making into the future and ensure consistency in policy and practices across government. Importantly, it will take into account the community’s interest in the management of Canberra’s urban forest and identify best practice principles and procedures that will be applied to the management of trees throughout their life and afterwards.
I am pleased to report that the government has also made significant progress in reviewing the Territory Plan and infrastructure design standards in the last 12 months. In late 2018 Minister Gentleman released the ACT planning strategy 2018. This strategy builds on the successes of the 2012 strategy and reflects and integrates the vision and directions of the ACT community; in particular in relation to housing, transport and climate change.
The ACT planning review will look at the Planning and Development Act 2007 and the Territory Plan and how they form the ACT planning system. As part of the review, relevant government policies, such as those in the living infrastructure plan, will be incorporated into the Territory Plan to enable them to be taken into consideration in the development assessment process. New TCCS infrastructure design standards were released in April 2019 as part of this broader picture of work and are available to view on the TCCS website.
One of the actions under the living infrastructure plan and a motion from the Assembly in 2017 was to review the Tree Protection Act. Yesterday I announced that the ACT government has started this review and I released a discussion paper and survey. I present the following paper:
Review of the Tree Protection Act 2005—Discussion paper—October 2019.
The Tree Protection Act sets out how we manage trees on leased land and has a focus on protecting individual trees rather than the broader urban forest. Under our existing tree protection laws thousands of trees are removed on leased land in Canberra and not replaced. We want to hear from the community on how we can improve this outcome. We are specifically asking if the community supports introducing a no net loss system of offsets so that, if a tree has to be removed, it will be replaced by one or more new trees either on the lease or in another place proximate. The legislation managing trees should contribute to growing our city’s tree canopy cover and the sensible management of our urban forest.
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