Melbourne’s green spaces are being lost in rush to build more housing

Melbourne has lost almost 2000 hectares of tree cover in the past five years as suburban backyards are cleared for new housing.

Members of the Upfield Urban Forest group: Anna Sinn,
Greta and Esme Holroyd, Tamar Hopkins and Gerard Morel.
 They are photographed in the Urban Forest near Brunswick station. 

The amount of urban forest that was removed between 2014 and 2018 is roughly equal in size to Reservoir, Melbourne’s largest suburb by area.

The eastern suburbs, long celebrated for their leafiness, experienced the greatest loss of greenery in that time, accounting for more than two-thirds of Melbourne's total tree canopy loss, researchers at RMIT University found.

By contrast, the western suburbs have enjoyed a small recent recovery in green growth, although this has been from a much lower base and has mostly occurred on public land.

Read the story from The Age by Adam Carey - “Melbourne’s green spaces are being lost in rush to build more housing.”

Swaths of native forest near Great Barrier Reef set to be bulldozed

Federal officials plan to back the destruction of almost 2000 hectares of pristine Queensland forest in a move that threatens the Great Barrier Reef and undermines a $500 million Turnbull government rescue package for the natural wonder.

Old growth forest in the vicinity of Kingvale Station,
near rivers that flow into the Great Barrier Reef.

A draft report by the Department of the Environment and Energy recommends that the government allow the mass vegetation clearing at Kingvale Station on Cape York Peninsula. The area to be bulldozed is almost three times the size of the combined central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne.

Read the story by Nicole Hasham from The Age - “Swaths of native forest near Great Barrier Reef set to be bulldozed.”

Largest fire in Los Angeles' history burns on city's outskirts, homes evacuated

The city of Los Angeles is under siege from a bushfire which the city's mayor has described as the largest in its history.

A plane makes a drop on a hillside in Sun Valley
neighbourhood, north of Los Angeles on Saturday.

The fire, which is burning in the La Tuna area in the north-east of the city, has consumed about 2000 hectares of brush in the San Fernando Valley's Verdugo Mountains.

By late on Saturday three homes had been lost and another 700 homes had been evacuated, roughly 550 of them from the Burbank and Glendale areas, which are adjacent to the fire.

The Burbank neighbourhood is also home to three of the city's biggest film studios, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney.

Read Michael Idato’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Largest fire in Los Angeles' history burns on city's outskirts, homes evacuated.”

(Los Angeles biggest ever wildfire (bushfire), unprecedented rainfall in Houston, and 1,200 people die, and the lives of some 40 million others turned upside down, by torrential rain in northern India, southern Nepal, northern Bangladesh and southern Pakistan - surely it is time the world stood as one recognising and acknowledging climate change - Robert McLean)