FAQs
- undertake a sustainability review
- identify topics and themes
- ask community about their priorities
- seek input from specialists in relevant fields
- review previous goals and targets as well as set new ones
What does sustainable environment mean in the City of Vincent?
The City of Vincent is committed to acting in a sustainable way and continuing to promote sustainability within Vincent’s diverse community. We work with community to ensure the liveability of Vincent for future generations alongside meeting current needs.
Over the last 12 years Vincent has developed strategies to guide decision-making across five key focus areas: energy and water use, waste, transport, emissions reduction and greening.
Our first Sustainable Environment Strategy (SES) 2011-16 was followed by the current SES 2019-2024. We are now recommending this be replaced by a more holistic Enhanced Environment Strategy, aligned to the Strategic Community Plan, and integrated across the Vincent’s operations.
The natural environment contributes greatly to our inner-city community. We want to protect and enhance it, making best use of our natural resources for the benefit of current and future generations.
What have we achieved so far?
Energy - We reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 48 per cent in the past five years. We also reached our target for reduced grid-electricity use thanks to the installation of many solar panel systems across City-owned buildings.
Transport - In 2021, we became the first local government in WA to drive and maintain a fully hybrid-electric light vehicle fleet. This has enabled us to reduce our transport emissions by close to 50 per cent over the last five years.
Water - Our scheme water usage has reduced 9 per cent and our ground water usage has reduced 6 per cent in the last five years. Programmed irrigation upgrades across our network will further reduce our water usage.
Waste - We achieved major leaps in waste with 37 per cent reduction in total waste to landfill over the last five years.
Urban Greening and Biodiversity - We have planted more than 15,445 street trees in the past five years. We also implemented over 30,000 m2 eco-zoning across our public open spaces.
What is next for sustainability in Vincent?
We are now preparing for our third-generation strategy in this ever-evolving space. To better integrate with Vincent’s Strategic Community Plan 2022-2032, the emerging strategy will fall under the 'enhanced environment' community priority area.
As part of this process, we will:
Finite resources inevitably mean we won’t be able to do everything we’d like to.
Firstly, we identified relevant themes and topics through undertaking a sustainability review that included best practice bench marking. Then we'll seek feedback on what community feel should be our priorities.
Why is it important to have a sustainability strategy?
Vincent is committed to improving our sustainable practices both as an organisation and as a community, and having a robust and up-to-date strategy is an essential step towards achieving that.
As a local government we are required to meet mandated targets from State and Federal Government, among others and it helps us to have a plan in place to ensure we can both measure and meet those targets.
The existence of a Strategy helps create awareness in this space and provides encouragement to individuals/ community groups to contribute and act sustainably.
Having a sustainability strategy defines, and in some cases, redefines areas of sustainability that the community rates as important and sets targets that can be tracked and measured.
Why should I get involved in the process?
It’s important the strategy reflects, as much as possible, community’s aspirations for where they live, work and play – if we don’t ask, and if you don’t tell us, we won’t know what that is.
This will be a focused opportunity to provide specific feedback by selecting priority topics from a pre-set list and by ranking the importance of existing targets.
How community ranks priorities will inform our approach in the Strategy. It will influence the themes we focus on and develop targets for.
Will there be another opportunity to have a say?
Yes. Toward the end of the process there will be a final opportunity to comment on the draft strategy and to let us know ‘have we got it right?’.
We’ll let people know when that will be and encourage everyone to have their say.