Australian Property Investor
As Australia’s cities continue to grow outwards, the frictions between urban expansion and the encroachment upon native bushland and the environment have perhaps never been so precariously balanced.
The pressures of population growth, a lack of housing supply, a rental crisis and property affordability issues all coalesce to fuel demand for new land subdivisions and entire new suburbs on the fringes of Australian cities.
The degree to which this expansion is managed effectively varies, and environmentalists and myriad government reports point out that threatened species are meanwhile losing habitat at a distressing pace.
The seemingly unstoppable expansion of Australian cities, and insight into possible solutions.
Habitat loss and degradation remain the main threats to land-based species in Australia, impacting nearly 70 per cent of threatened species.
According to the State of the Environment Report released this year, of the 7.7 million hectares of land habitat cleared between 2000 and 2017, a staggering 7.1 million hectares (93 per cent) was not referred to the federal government for assessment under the national environment law.
The difficulty in reconciling the often-competing demands on suburban fringe land has only been reinforced by the federal government’s commitment to building a million new homes in the next five years.
Developers and environmentalists are invariably pitted against each other in the debate surrounding urban expansion, or when it’s done poorly, urban sprawl.
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