I want you to imagine and visualise a future Dunedin.
In this future, Dunedin has become a "sponge city", where natural processes have been integrated into traditional engineering, creating a city that can weather major storm events and offers long-term climate solutions that also benefit the local community by providing green spaces and recreational areas that are a haven for Dunedin’s ever-increasing biodiversity.
No longer is our eco-corridor restricted to merely the Town Belt but integrated into all-of-city planning. Private developers are incentivised and happy to provide habitat and refuge for the city’s thriving indigenous plants and animals when they are building in our great small city.
Piped watercourses are no longer hidden underground and a bottleneck for increasing stormwater discharges, but are "daylighted", creating important overland flow paths — and these watercourses have become ecosystems in themselves.
At the weekends, families have fun searching for indigenous galaxiids and koura in our urban waterways, like Kaikorai Stream, and mana whenua are finding it much easier to exercise mahika kai and provide for their whānau from Dunedin’s kete.
Our ever-increasing blue-green infrastructure and native plantings throughout the city are helping keep us a carbon-zero city, a title we achieved many years ago, funded appropriately by the council of the day and supported by local businesses, community groups, e-NGOs, tourists and residents alike.
Our reliance on unsustainable practices such as fossil fuels is a thing of the past, and our transport network has been designed to incorporate multiple modes of transport safely, with less focus on traditional car transport, and most residents who are able to choose to walk, bike, scooter and bus via our world-class network.
Our city is booming, its "wildlife capital" status growing, and eco-tourism has grown to be Dunedin’s most prosperous industry, building on the millions it already contributes to the local economy.
A walk on the beach with your leashed canine isn’t burdened by disappearing sand dunes and bereft of vegetation, but instead you are tripping over the many pakake (NZ sea lions) that have continued to increase on our coasts and now have colony status. In the evening, you can watch hoiho return home — they are now making a remarkable comeback after being on the absolute brink of extinction.
Sea birds are continuing to nest here before they travel thousands of kilometres across the globe, and their nests and burrows are not at risk of being invaded by ferrets and feral cats, among other things.
No matter where you live in the city, you can walk outside and hear bird song from our flourishing urban bird population, including tui, korimako, riorio and others. You have to duck to avoid getting knocked over by low-flying kererū, with kākā and tīeke overflowing from Orokonui and making their home in our many southern rātā, ponga, mataī, rimu, tōtara, miro, and hīnau trees.
Stepping outside at dusk, ruru calls echo throughout the city.
This is an Ōtepoti Dunedin which I want my three kids and their children to be able to live and thrive in; a Dunedin not strangled by short-term thinking and councillor terms but focused on long-term goals which provide long-term solutions to difficult and complex issues.
The answers are out there, and they’re in nature. If we look after nature, it will look after us.
The jury is already out, the Dunedin community has already spoken and said, via the pre-long-term plan survey, they want Dunedin to be a sustainable and resilient city with less waste, strong biodiversity and a healthy environment.
The kind of Dunedin that is envisioned here, and that the community have asked for, is not a pipe-dream — it is achievable.
This is the address which Forest & Bird delivered at the Dunedin City Council’s long-term plan hearing, and we believe the long-term plan is where the council can begin to realise this vision.
The purpose of the Local Government Act is to promote the social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing of communities — creating a biodiverse, environmentally sustainable and climate-resilient Dunedin ticks all these boxes, and it is the future Dunedin and all the communities that live within it, human or otherwise, need.
It is the council’s responsibility to ensure that this happens, to look after our city and those within it and to be aspirational.
• Chelsea McGaw is an environmental scientist, and Forest & Bird’s regional conservation manager for Otago and Southland.
