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BUILDER'S ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE |
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While Landcom takes pride in its achievements, it acknowledges that there is always room for improvement.
This year, we have faced challenges in meeting our moderate income housing and renewable energy targets. We have also flagged the environmental performance of our contract builders working on Landcom sites as a concern and we recognise the continuing difficulties in delivering effective biodiversity management and social sustainability across our projects.
MODERATE INCOME HOUSING
Landcom remains committed to meeting its target for provision of moderate income housing. However, we continue to face difficulty in delivering housing products that are affordable for moderate income households.
While Landcom delivered 6.2% of its housing product during the year at a price considered affordable to moderate income households, this result was lower than its target of 7.5% by 2008 and down from last year’s result of 12%.
The significant increase in land values in Sydney has driven this outcome. Despite the recent slowdown in the Sydney property market, land prices generally remain outside levels that are affordable for moderate income householders.
In an attempt to address this issue at a “grass roots” level, Landcom has been working in partnership with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to develop a Shared Equity Model. Together, we hope to provide a simple but feasible financial product – one that assists moderate income earners to enter the property market by purchasing their own home while still providing an arrangement that is financially attractive to institutional investors.
By seeking to encourage institutional investors into this area of the market, Landcom is hoping to deliver some substantial social benefits.
RENEWABLE ENERGY
Landcom’s target is to install solar hot water systems within all its “built form” projects by 2008. However, during the year, solar hot water systems were only installed within 32% of all homes constructed during the year (i.e. 53 out of 167). This is a reduction from 36% in 2004/2005 and 44% in 2003/2004.
Despite this decline, we will continue to pursue our target.
BUILDERS' ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE
Landcom audits its civil contracts to monitor the environmental performance of builders working on its projects and to improve environmental management on its building sites. Landcom’s target is for all builders working on Landcom sites to achieve an audit score of greater than 75%.
This year, 9 audits were undertaken, but only 1 audit scored over 75%. In order to address this issue, Landcom will continue to offer environmental training to all builders working on its projects over the next 12 months.
BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT
Sydney must manage its population growth. While the Government has taken a responsible approach by requiring that up to 70% of this growth take place within existing urban areas over the next 25 years, the balance will occur as new urban expansion. And even though this new growth is planned within two designated Growth Sectors, it is inevitable that these areas, currently non-urban, will contain areas of biodiversity.
There is a fundamental conflict between retaining existing biodiversity and the need to maintain a responsible approach to Sydney’s growth. While Landcom conserved approximately 154 ha of land containing Endangered Ecological Communities on projects that were planned during the year, it also cleared virtually the same area of residentially zoned land.
Even though the majority of this cleared land was identified as being of low or moderate conservation significance, the need to maintain a constant balance between development and biodiversity remains an ongoing challenge for the organisation and the development industry in general.
We are committed to lessening the impact of our developments as much as possible, through careful design and offsetting.
Furthermore, for the conservation areas within our projects, we are developing long-term management mechanisms and funding to ensure the conservation outcomes in perpetuity. Our Edmondson Park and Second Ponds Creek developments are recent examples of this approach.
SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
Achieving social sustainability is essentially about planning for healthy communities. A healthy community is one that functions well as a whole, where the individuals in that community have the opportunities and freedoms to live their lives in a healthy, fulfilled and self-determined way.
Landcom’s goal is to ensure that it puts the right building blocks in place for healthy communities to prosper. However, one of our biggest challenges is that not all the actions required to achieve healthy communities are within our control or area of responsibility.
This highlights the importance of our role as a facilitator. To achieve our social objectives, we need to have the commitment of all stakeholders early in the planning process and we need to ensure they work with us through the life of each project.
Diverse communities tend to be strong communities. To enable diverse communities, we need to provide a diverse range of housing to cater for their needs. However, there are challenges to achieving diversity, too. Planning controls that are established to protect neighbourhood character often reduce the housing diversity that can be achieved. To address this challenge, we will continue to work closely with Local Government to ensure their planning policies support long-term social sustainability objectives, while also protecting neighbourhood character.
For a list of actions addressing our key sustainability challenges please download the pdf (24KB).