
Canberra’s urban expansion needs to stop, the report says. Photo: Ian Bushnell.
The ACT Government should firm up its infill policy, set an urban growth boundary, and boost funding and strengthen laws to protect the environment, a damning new report into Canberra’s urban expansion says.
In the report – Close to the Edge: An Investigation into the effects of urban expansion on the environment of the ACT – ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment Dr Sophie Lewis calls out decades of government inaction and complicity in the destruction of the ACT’s environment.
Dr Lewis says the 2023 ACT State of the Environment Report outlined what was needed to redress the decline but the government response largely rejected this agenda and instead accepted the outlined environmental destruction as a “sad and unfortunate reality”.
“The current state of our environment is the predictable outcome of ineffective legislation and policy,” she says. “Maintaining the same approach and rejecting reform is – without doubt – tacit acceptance of and contribution to the biodiversity crisis.”
The report says the current settings have failed to deliver a compact city and makes 15 recommendations covering legislative, policy and planning actions that would help turn the tide and keep what is left of the natural estate.
The government has agreed to consider establishing city limits by 2027 but the report calls for an urban growth boundary to be set now and for the ‘up to’ 70 per cent infill target to be strengthened to ‘at least’ 70 per cent.
In the suburbs, the reports says laws to retain mature trees in developments should be strengthened, artificial turf banned and removed, and funding increased for high-quality living infrastructure.
It calls for the development application assessment process to be toughened so any proposals that negatively impact threatened ecological communities are refused.
Environmental assessments should have to be done by qualified ecological consultants hired by and accountable to the Conservator for Flora and Fauna, not the developer.
Environmental impact statements and environmental significance opinions should use standardised assessment criteria not guides.
The report found that from 2004 to 2023 the ACT’s building footprint grew by 40 per cent, mainly due to greenfield developments, and impacting threatened Box-Gum Grassy Woodland and Natural Temperate Grassland, with 66 per cent of the original cover lost, leaving 10,865 ha remaining out of an original 32,000 ha.
Further small losses will be ‘death by a thousand cuts’, the report says.
Urban development also affected 30 of the ACT’s 66 threatened species, including birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and insects.
The report says there are two core issues behind the precarious state of the ACT’s environment – biodiversity is not sufficiently prioritised in legislation and policy making, and government spending on the environment is demonstrably inadequate.
In the 2023-24 and 2024-25 ACT budgets, only 3 per cent of total spending was allocated to the environment, sustainable development and climate change combined, the lowest proportion of budget allocation to any of the 11 identified areas apart from one, it says.
The proportion of this funding that goes to biodiversity conservation is only a fraction of 1 per cent of the total ACT budget.
“It is therefore hard to take the view that biodiversity protection is a genuine priority for the ACT,” the report says.
The report says the environment is not top of mind in legislation and rarely prioritised in the implementation of government policy.
Mature trees may be recognised legally but are not sufficiently protected or retained, urban green infrastructure such as native plantings and rain gardens is inconsistently implemented and conservation is focused on reactive measures such as offsets, it says.