Healthy Land & Water was blown away by the sheer amount of intel provided during its recent regional workshop series.

Healthy Land & Water's recent regional workshop series provided a sheer amount of intel. 

The record attendance at the workshops is a sign of the growing recognition of the importance of the environment and the need to take action to protect it.

The Healthy Land & Water team hit the road recently to hear first-hand advice from local people on the biggest local issues. It was also the chance to present a snapshot of some of Healthy Land & Water’s latest data and science.

Over the course of six workshops, there was an enormous amount of information collected on the actions needed across SEQ to get us to where we want to be.

This is now being analysed and cross-purposed for use across our projects and to inform where investment is needed.

Analysis of data underway, initial outcomes identified

Ahead of the results of the full data analysis, the team has noted a few of the overarching outcomes from the workshops. Perhaps the largest was the community support for action. Other key outcomes from the workshops included:

• Driving community involvement in developing and identifying the changes (including actions, policy, management, and practice) needed to respond to resilience needs and a changing climate and achieve the targets set out in the South East Queensland Natural Resource Management Plan 2031 (NRM Plan).
• Raising awareness of the importance of this work in building the prosperity, liveability, and sustainability of our future region.
• Connecting a variety of community members with various interests to increase understanding of what each is doing and the challenges they face as well as increasing the likelihood of future collaboration.
• Gaining intel to feed into the campaign to show the government and industry that there is an urgent need to assign significant proactive investment into key resilience measures. The local actions identified during these workshops will feed into our Roadmap to resilience catchment action plan
• Gaining intel to support a wide range of upcoming funding proposals and underpin our government and industry engagement advising where investment is most needed.
• Gaining intel to populate this year’s Report Card Catchment Summaries document with priority regional actions.
• Ensuring our team is actively engaging with people from across the region, by going to their backyard to make it easier for everyone to get involved and contribute their local knowledge.

Healthy Land & Water would like to thank everyone who made time out of their busy schedules to attend one the six workshops held as part of the series:

• Southern Coast workshop (Gold Coast catchments).
• Western catchments workshop (Logan-Albert, Bremer & Lockyer, Mid Brisbane, Upper Brisbane and Stanley).
• Central Coast workshop (Pine, Lower Brisbane, Lower Logan-Albert, Redlands and Moreton Bay and islands).
• North Coast workshop (Noosa, Maroochy, Pumicestone & Caboolture).
• Online workshop.