Urban Infrastructure Projects: Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne Metropolitan Urban Forest Strategy

The urban forest in the City of Melbourne alone was recently valued at $700 million — this accounts for the natural services these trees provide, as well as factors such as the increase in nearby property values. In conjunction with The Nature Conservancy, Melbourne is developing a metropolitan urban forest strategy. This strategy will enable all those currently involved, and others wanting to deliver urban greening projects in future, to understand how their efforts can best contribute to improving ecosystem health and services such as urban cooling and flood mitigation. It will achieve this by:

• Highlighting how and where existing initiatives can be expanded
• Enabling the sharing of resources and knowledge by linking together currently disparate efforts
• Providing councils better information about their existing tree canopy cover, making resources available for public and private entities
• Providing opportunities for utility providers and infrastructure owners to address implementation barriers and help make Melbourne greener and cooler.

Investment/Partnership Opportunity:

Inspired by the Murray-Darling Basin Balanced Water Fund, Melbourne, is considering the feasibility of innovative funding and financing mechanisms to enable the implementation of the Urban Forest Strategy.

Melbourne is seeking a partner to help them scope out possible investment mechanisms to establish and seed a sustainable financing model for the implementation of the urban forest strategy.

Contact:

Chief Resilience Officer Toby Kent, Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office
Toby.Kent@melbourne.vic.gov.au

Metropolitan Cycling network

Although Melbourne has an extensive network of public transport, the 2011 census found that 60.6 per cent of Melburnians drive a car to work. When coupled with a rapidly growing population, this heavy reliance on private vehicle travel is leading to increasing congestion. Equally, active transport now makes up 1.8% of all trips, exceeding the number of trips taken by tram (1.5%).

The Metropolitan Cycling Network will assist Melbourne to thrive following acute shocks and chronic stresses, and significantly improve people’s quality of life. A series of workshops completed in 2017 utilized an audience of industry leaders to develop a set of actions that will serve as a guide to resolve the key identified barriers to achieving the Metropolitan Cycling Network vision, to make the Melbourne the best cycling city in Australia.

Resilient Melbourne is currently developing a Bicycle Planning and Design Toolkit which would provide stakeholders with the appropriate reference material to plan and deliver cycling infrastructure within metropolitan.

Investment/Partnership Opportunity:

The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office has developed a near term action plan.

Melbourne is seeking technical expertise and best practice case studies for designing, implementing and evaluating cycling strategies at the metropolitan scale to help the city build a business case for continued funding.

Contact:

Chief Resilience Officer Toby Kent, Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office
Toby.Kent@melbourne.vic.gov.au