In 2023, we invited the Glen Eira community to help shape our first-ever Biodiversity Plan. Since then, we’ve continued to collaborate with Traditional Owners, local experts, and neighbouring councils to explore new ideas and opportunities for protecting and enhancing our local biodiversity.

The development of the Biodiversity Plan has now been completed. The steps to engage with our community is outlined below.

Council has reaffirmed its commitment to adopting and starting to implement a Glen Eira Biodiversity Plan in 2024–2025, as part of the Council Plan Annual Action Plan 2024—2025 endorsed at the June Council meeting.

To support this goal, we’ll continue to engage meaningfully with Traditional Owners and collaborate with our neighbouring councils for new ideas and opportunities. We think it’s important to engage deeply with all stakeholders to develop a Biodiversity Plan which safeguards Glen Eira’s environment into the future.

This means instead of seeking community feedback in June, as we suggested in the June Glen Eira News, we’ll keep doing the meaningful consultation and research needed for this important Plan before we share a draft with the community. We now plan to engage with the community on a draft Plan after the 2024 local government election later this year.

In the meantime, we’ll continue taking significant action to enhance Glen Eira’s biodiversity, in line with the actions of our Urban Forest Strategy, Our Climate Emergency Response Strategy 2021–2025 | Dhumbali Wurrungi-biik Parbin-ata, and other council plans and programs.

Your thoughts and ideas continue to shape the development of our Biodiversity Plan and we thank you for your contribution. You can download a copy of the 2024 Engagement Report from the Document Library on this page.

Last year, we heard from respondents that:

Protecting our native species requires the combined effort of everyone in Glen Eira, so we’re calling on you to help.

Biodiversity has wide reaching economic, environmental, and health and wellbeing benefits that support our ecosystems and protect our quality of life.

While Glen Eira has been urbanised for many decades, there are still some local places where native indigenous species have survived. When managed in the right way, our urban environment can both protect and promote biodiversity.

We want to expand the work we are already doing to protect our native environment, and increase our community’s knowledge and efforts to protect and promote our biodiversity, now and into the future.

You can get involved and share your thoughts through our survey, workshops and engagement activities. Your views on biodiversity will help us develop actions in our first Biodiversity Plan.

Come along to a range of nature walks, citizen science programs, workshops, and school activities being held. These activities will support further conversations with our community about our native species and how to protect them.