Interim Guidelines for the Management of Roadside Vegetation Dec 2018
The Native Vegetation Council has developed new interim guidelines for managing native vegetation on roadsides across South Australia.
We are concerned that the guidelines explicitly "aim to provide local councils and the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure with greater capacity to clear roadside vegetation", and that they do not adequately protect important native vegetation. Roadside vegetation can be of very high biodiversity value and in some parts of the state it represents the last vestiges of vegetation communities that were historically much more widespread.
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The conservation and management of water in the Murray River continues to be of concern to NCSSA. In response the draft Water Allocation Plan for the Murray River, we expressed our deep concern that the Plan states that "the environmental water requirements of the South Australian portion of River Murray and its floodplains cannot be met at the current level of consumptive use". In our view, this does not represent a "balance between social, economic and environmental outcomes" but an ongoing failure of our collective governance to adequately address environmental requirements as a first, necessary step to restoring the health of the system, and to allocating consumption only from the water that remains.