By Rachel Eddie
Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs are rapidly losing their trees as homeowners intent on expanding their houses cut them down.
“It’s absolutely noticeable,” said David Morrison, from the Blackburn and District Tree Preservation Society.
“You can hear the chainsaws running two or three times a week.”
David Morrison in the leafy streets of Blackburn, where canopy trees are declining.Credit: Eddie Jim
Melbourne lost 0.3 per cent of its green canopy coverage between 2014 and 2018, an analysis by RMIT University found.
Yarra Ranges fared the worst, with canopies declining 3.8 per cent, while the broader east lost 2.3 per cent of its shady trees.
Tree coverage is slightly improving in the city’s far-from-leafy western suburbs. But in sprawling estates where homes are often built to the corner of each block, there is little room for new trees on residential land.
“It’s the patio, it’s the pool, it’s making too much mess, it’s messing with my foundations.”
Associate Professor Joe Hurley
The Andrews government last year funded the planting of 500,000 new trees for the west after The Age reported the region had just 5.5 per cent canopy cover, compared with a healthier 25.9 per cent in the east.
Canopy trees cool cities by providing shade and minimising the urban heat island effect in which surfaces such as asphalt trap heat and raise the air temperature.
Associate Professor Joe Hurley, from the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT, said about two-thirds of the losses on residential land were not the result of “capital D development”.
Often, it happens incrementally. Hurley said residents might cut down a tree to protect their views or build a double garage.
“It’s the patio, it’s the pool, it’s making too much mess, it’s messing with my foundations.”
He said all properties should be making a contribution to the broader liveability of neighbourhoods.
“If everyone individually opts out of that and says, ‘Well, it’s my yard, I want to have a new alfresco dining area’, cumulatively, we lose an infrastructure that we really need.”
Whitehorse Council – where canopy coverage dropped 2.3 per cent in four years – believes one source of the problem is the VicSmart process, which is designed to simplify and fast-track small-scale planning permits.
Property owners can seek to remove a tree through the process, which requires a council to determine applications in 10 business days without advertising the application to neighbours.
Whitehorse Mayor Tina Liu, whose council area takes in Blackburn, Burwood, Box Hill and Mont Albert, said the system was open to abuse because landowners sometimes made multiple applications rather than removing a single tree as the system intended.
In one case, six trees were lopped on one property through separate applications.
In the Yarra Ranges – which lost more canopy trees than any other local government area in Melbourne between 2014 and 2018, and another 25,000 trees in last year’s deadly June storms – the council was not aware of multiple tree removals under the VicSmart system in the past five years.
Victorian Greens Leader Samantha Ratnam and Sustainable Australia MP Clifford Hayes were alerted to concerns about the VicSmart system at community meetings after a full parliamentary inquiry into the planning system was delayed.
“Victoria’s planning system is broken in many ways and without a full-scale inquiry we won’t even scratch the surface of what needs to be done to fix it,” said Ratnam, who is calling for the full inquiry to be brought forward.
Melbourne’s western suburbs gained a modest 275 hectares of tree canopy coverage between 2014 and 2018, RMIT found, but improvements were almost exclusively on public land through campaigns such as Greening the West.
Some local councils in the west have taken strict action to increase canopy coverage. Brimbank requires two-lot subdivisions to have two trees at the front and one at the rear of a property.
Hurley said the canopy tree losses tended to be the same whether a single home was rebuilt or replaced with an apartment complex.
“Development is a driver of loss. But it’s not like big development is a bigger driver of loss. In fact, it’s very similar, and it’s delivering a strategically important contribution to our urban environment, which is dwelling supply,” he said.
The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning has endorsed targets for each Melbourne region of up to 30 per cent canopy coverage by 2050.
A Victorian government spokesman said plans were underway to grow urban forests and enhance livability “while ensuring future housing growth”.
The Housing Industry Association shunned the canopy targets, which it described as aggressive and arbitrary, believing they could undermine its capacity to build for a growing population.
The industry body has instead called for a no-net loss principle for private development, arguing that design plans ensure most new developments already include appropriate vegetation.
Danni Hunter, Victorian executive director of the Property Council, said most developers were conscious of creating good amenity.
“It’s not a case of one or the other. It’s not ‘more trees, or more houses’.”
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