Overview

Greening and the benefits it brings to our region are valuable for everyone, helping to ensure the high levels of liveability and environmental amenity our region is renowned for, are maintained.

The aim of the MidCoast Greening Strategy is to manage and enhance the quality and extent of vegetation across our diverse landscapes – or put simply, to retain and plant trees today for our enjoyment, and to create a positive legacy for future generations.

The value of vegetation is recognised in the MidCoast Greening Strategy and includes:

• Improved amenity and recreation
• Improved liveability and wellbeing
• Minimised impact of climate change pressure
• Economic benefits

Five focus areas:

Our region is large and we have limited resources. In order to focus our efforts for the most effective outcomes, our strategy identifies five key areas or ‘principles’ and actions that can be undertaken to achieve those outcomes.

• Cooling our urban areas
• Keeping what we have
• Building partnerships
• Right trees in the right place
• Planning for the future

View our MidCoast Greening Strategy below

To view the MidCoast Greening Strategy document in full-screen in the interactive PDF viewer above, select the bracket icon at the bottom-right side the toolbar to enable full-screen.

If you are having trouble viewing the document in the interactive PDF viewer, you may also download the full MidCoast Greening Strategy in the Document library on this page.

Exhibition period

During May and June 2021 we took a draft MidCoast Greening Strategy to our community for comment.

The feedback received from the community was considered and some changes made to the draft document.

The strategy was then adopted by the elected Council at the 28 July 2021 Ordinary Meeting.

Consultation feedback

During the consultation period, we received feedback from the community on the strategy, with key topics raised including:

• funding - concern over no net increase in funding for implementing the Strategy’s initiatives,
• review - the Strategy should be reviewed more frequently, and progress should be monitored,
• MidCoast LEP and DCP - suggestions were provided as to the content that could be included in the proposed MidCoast Local Environmental Plan and Development Control Plan,
• education programs - suggestions were provided for education programs that Council could investigate and implement,
• removal of vegetation - the community has concern over the environmental impacts of new developments in particular and developers need to be made to follow the rules and offset their impact,
• offsetting opportunities - the need to replace trees and vegetation that are removed by both Council and developers.

Changes in response to submissions

A number of changes were made to the draft strategy in response to the feedback provided in the submissions.

These changes include:

• expanding action 2.2 - to provide contact details on Council’s website for other government agencies that administer vegetation controls,
• amendments to the offsets section - to better acknowledge that offsets can be used when the impacts of a development are unavoidable and effort should first be made to prevent or reduce the impacts prior to using offsets,
• amendments to Principle 2 - to show that significant trees or tracts of mature vegetation can take over 100 years to reach maturity.

A summary of all the submissions can be found in the Document Library.