Environmental Sustainability Strategy – Pursuing, supporting and creating a sustainable environment for the Unley community

The development of this document follows the strategic direction set by the Community Plan 2033 with a particular focus on achieving Goal 4: Greening Our Path to a Sustainable City. The Greening goal aims for the City of Unley to be renowned for its lifestyle and environmental balance, leaders in waste management and functional open green space throughout. These environmental systems are intrinsically linked and there is overlap between them, however these themes classify the work into manageable sections to focus our efforts. Key are: –
improving and maintaining Unley’s Urban Forest, maintaining the City’s tree canopy cover at 26 per cent, having a minimum 400 street verges converted from dolomite to loam and planted.
The City of Unley is an urban environment noted for its tree-lined streets, parks and private gardens. The protection of Unley’s trees and street trees is particularly important to mitigating the impacts of climate, the urban heat island effect and a range of other benefits. This work is guided in detail by the City’s Tree Strategy (also in the PaRDC library). There is also an excellent opportunity to encourage more of the verges to be planted. Most are currently dolomite which is not water permeable. If these are replaced with loam and low plantings or with lawn maintained by the residents, it will help improve soil moisture, reflected heat and add to the cool, green feel of the City. While the key targets for the next four years focuses on trees and improving the greening of our streetscapes, ongoing work in parks, reserves, residential gardens and the encouragement of local food production is still very significant and ongoing.
Key initiatives include: trees, habitat boxes, verge gardening by residents, biodiversity native plantings, maintenance of parks and open space, encouragement of private plantings, food security including encouraging local food production, community gardens,.increasing open space. encouragement to establishing vertical and rooftop gardens