14 October 2020

After undertaking Australia’s first national canopy benchmarking project Where Are All The Trees? in 2014 and its companion guide, Where Should All the Trees Go? in 2017, Where Will All The Trees Be? is the third iteration in the series, due to be published in October 2020.

Led by RMIT University, Greener Spaces Better Places and funded by Hort Innovation, the aim of the research project Where Will All The Trees Be? is to offer a clear visual understanding of what our streets, places and suburbs are likely to look like in the future, depending on how many mature trees they will (or won’t) have. The research will also provide the opportunity to start a conversation on the barriers and opportunities in creating leafy, resilient, healthy and prosperous urban places to live, work and play. 

As part of the methodology, a survey has been developed for all urban Local Government Areas across Australia exploring four key areas: community, governance, resources and data. These findings will be combined with a paired-sample i-Tree analysis to understand the average changes that have occurred to tree canopy and urban greening since the last national benchmarking report Where Should All The Trees Go?,  and packaged into a final report.

Comparing apples to apples

We know that each of Australia’s urban Local Government Areas (LGAs) are incredibly diverse in terms of demographic profile, climate, density and population size, and function under different planning systems – meaning, urban greening is undertaken under very different contexts and faces different challenges around Australia.  That’s why this year’s research groups LGA results into six categories:

• Sprawling and Spacious: 
  • largely non-urban and low density, average-high rainfall
  • largely non-urban and low density, low rainfall
• Spacious and Urban:
  • largely urban and low density, average-high rainfall
  • largely urban and low density, low rainfall
• Urban and Compact:
  • largely urban and high density, average-high rainfall
  • largely urban and high density, low rainfall

These categories provide more like-for-like comparisons of councils’ results allowing for:

• Better understanding of overarching trends and patterns in each category
• Greater understanding of the key barriers and enablers of urban greening
• Identification of which councils are ‘bucking the trend’ in their category, and why
• pinpoints the councils that are making great progress in increasing urban canopy, even as density and population increases in their area – which in turn serves as a great example to the other LGAs in their category looking to follow suit.
• All of which informs more precise and efficient ways in which Greener Spaces Better Places can support LGAs in their future urban greening efforts, ultimately ensuring that as our cities grow, so too do our green spaces

For the first time ever, this year’s report will also match pairs of data that tell us with more accuracy the nature of change of specific points, for example from a hard surface to a green one, or a tree to a road.

All of this research will be brought to life via an interactive online tool on the Greener Spaces Better Places website, and will be accompanied by an explainer PDF. 

I would like to know more! Who can I speak to?

If you want any further information concerning this project, please make contact with RMIT via the following email: urbanforest.survey@rmit.edu.au

For further information about GSBP's involvement or the communications of the research results, please get in touch with Lauren Sinfield via laurens@thebraveryishere.com