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.”

Losing the wilderness: a 10th has gone since 1992 – and gone for good

The world’s last great wildernesses are shrinking at an alarming rate. In the past two decades, 10% of the earth’s wilderness has been lost due to human pressure, a mapping study by the University of Queensland has found.

University of Queensland study shows since 1992, 3m sq km of wilderness have been lost.

Over the course of human history, there has been a major degradation of 52% of the earth’s ecosystems, while the remaining 48% is being increasingly eroded. Since 1992, when the United Nations signed up to the Rio convention on biological diversity, three million square kilometres of wilderness have been lost.

Read The Guardian story by Susan Cherney - “Losing the wilderness: a 10th has gone since 1992 – and gone for good.”