Logan City, Australia

Monitoring, Maintenance, and Management

How has the initiative been designed and implemented so that long-term needs for management and maintenance are reduced and can be met?

LCC has already achieved great success in delivering actions that will protect, enhance connect and celebrate our natural environment and biodiversity values not only our organisation but the community as well.  These initiatives have been designed and selected with consideration of environmental, economic, social and governance outcomes.  All are realistic achievable and ongoing monitoring has proven they are delivering.  Selected on these basis means they are designed and implemented so that long-term needs for management and maintenance are reduced and can be met.

What protocols are in place to facilitate monitoring of results?

The City of Logan’s natural environment is protected, enhanced, connected and celebrated to provide valued spaces for people, plants and animals now and into the future. 10,000 native trees and shrubs are planted annually across the City of Logan’s riverside parks. To-date council has planted more than 77,000 trees through offset funding which will be protected forever from clearing.

Incredibly, Logan City Council was named “Best on ground’’ by the Greener Spaces Better Places network for increasing the city’s green cover by 5% at a time that annual population growth was 2%. Council’s own data shows an increase in the city’s tree canopy from 41% in 2016 to 53% in 2020. This has been achieved through a combination of protecting and buying key natural areas. Most of this is achieved through regrowth of protected vegetation on private land which is driven and supported through our private land conservation partnerships program providing incentives, support and funding to private landowners to protect and enhance bushland on their properties.

How has the initiative been enhanced in response to monitoring of results?

Logan City Council’s living green for biodiversity suite of initiatives has had a considerable ripple effect particularly on neighbouring and nearby local governments.

Many of the key deliverables have regional collaboration at its core with mechanisms for enhanced/wider adoption of local nature-oriented practice and/or offer potential for customised replication in other cities.