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Bridging the Gap between Planning and NRM

The draft 30-Year Plan for Greater Adelaide prepared by the State Government is one of the most significant strategic planning processes ever undertaken in South Australia. In preparing the plan, a range of complex issues needed to be balanced against community views and aspirations, and the strategic directions for the future growth, prosperity and sustainability of Greater Adelaide.

Planning plays a critical role in managing our natural resources appropriately and mitigating the effects of climate change. For this reason, the Natural Resource Management (NRM) Council and the Premier's Climate Change (PCC) Council engaged URPS to review the draft 30-Year Plan and prepare a joint submission.

The project involved reviewing and evaluating the plan from both the NRM and climate change perspectives. The evaluation process involved cross-referencing the content of the plan with a range of government-endorsed strategies and using expert input to identify alternative policy directions where required.

Significantly, we found that the 30-Year Plan meets the need for a strong strategic foundation to address key environmental issues such as climate change, water security and a more compact urban form to achieve a 'carbon efficient city'. At the same time, there were some areas where it was considered that the 30-Year Plan could go further to achieve better environmental outcomes. Such areas included adapting to sea level rise and the link between water availability and water use by approved development.

The Minister for Urban Development & Planning released the Ministerial Mount Barker Urban Growth Development Plan Amendment (DPA) in June 2010 for public consultation. This DPA proposes to rezone approximately 1300 hectares of rural land on the edges of Mt Barker and Nairne for residential and light industrial use.

With the aim of ensuring that its community was well informed and empowered to comment on the Ministerial DPA, the District Council of Mt Barker engaged URPS to run a series of information sessions for the local community. These six sessions were extremely well attended, with more than 300 people able to hear about and ask questions regarding the Ministerial DPA process and how to go about getting involved in this part of the planning system.

In a letter to the editor of the Mt Barker Courier, Jean Lovell of Nairne said that "Mt Barker Council is to be congratulated for its commitment to proper community consultation" and that URPS was "highly professional and responded in detail to questions in an articulate, honest and informed manner".

This is evidence of the success of these types of community information sessions and the goodwill and engagement that Mt Barker Council has fostered with its community through the process. We also believe that this type of process leads to informed and valuable input from the community to key planning initiatives such as this Ministerial DPA."