Inclusive Urban Greening

Around Australia and across the world, cities and towns are preparing and implementing urban greening strategies. These strategies seek to increase urban tree cover to mitigate climate change impacts (e.g., stormwater runoff and extreme heat) and improve residents’ health and wellbeing. Australia’s Strategy for Nature recognises the need to increase people’s access to, and interaction with, diverse forms of nature. This is important if we are to build a broad base of support for environmental restoration actions.

Research shows that while parks, street trees, and other types of green infrastructure can increase biodiversity in our cities, they are not uniformly distributed. Moreover, tree canopy cover is decreasing across Australia’s cities, associated with densification. People experiencing marginality and disadvantage typically have fewer parks and street trees in their neighbourhoods. They often face barriers to participating in urban greening activities and are rarely included in the development of urban greening strategies. This situation presents an environmental inequity.

This short report examines the causes of social exclusion in urban greening and identifies steps that can be taken to make urban greening more inclusive. The causes of exclusion include embedded patterns of elitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination. Potential solutions include adopting principles, processes and practices that enable diverse groups of people to participate actively and meaningfully in the spectrum of urban greening activities.

Social polarisation in Australia is worsening and it harms the social fabric of our communities, is associated with ill health, and presents a substantial impediment to prosperity, wellbeing, and environmental quality. Taking steps now to promote inclusive urban greening can strengthen civil society, increase the resilience of communities to extreme events associated with climate change (e.g., heatwaves), and can also bolster biological diversity by increasing urban tree canopy cover and greenspace provision across built environments.

Effective steps to improve inclusion in greening include diversifying community engagement to allow more opportunities for participation from different groups of people, providing supporting resources that enable ongoing participation, strategically targeting poorly represented groups to bolster participation, building longer term partnerships with groups experiencing exclusion, marginality and disadvantage, and adopting practices for inclusive greening, among other actions.