Resilient South Draft Regional Climate Action Plan

Resilient South is a regional climate partnership between the Cities of Holdfast Bay, Marion, Mitcham and Onkaparinga and the Government of South Australia. We have been working together since 2011 to strengthen the climate resilience of southern Adelaide. We are developing a plan for what our priorities should be for the next five years and have asked for the community to provide input into where we should focus our attention.

In December 2022-January 2023, we asked you to tell us what you think we should be doing to support the community to reduce emissions and respond to climate change. We also asked what you think our future “climate-ready” southern Adelaide region should look like.

The Resilient South partners have listened to your feedback and prepared a draft Resilient South Regional Climate Action Plan (ReCAP), which provides a strategic focus for the Resilient South councils to undertake adaption to a changing climate and further reduce greenhouse gas emissions across southern Adelaide. The ReCAP focuses priorities for working together. Councils will continue to deliver their individual projects to progress climate action, including tree planting and greening, coastal adaptation planning, recycling and council emissions reduction.

The draft plan has been developed through consultation with our key stakeholders, including the agencies that we work with, Kaurna representatives, young people, and a general community survey.

The draft Resilient South Regional Climate Action Plan (ReCAP) was released for public consultation from Friday November 3 to Friday 1 December. Through their relevant engagement platforms, each of the four Resilient South councils invited interested members of the community to participate in a survey seeking their feedback on the draft plan. 240 people responded to the survey. 34% of survey respondents were from the City of Mitcham, 33% were from the City of Onkaparinga, 22% were from the City of Marion and 11% were from the City of Holdfast Bay. One person was from a different council.

Overall, 61% of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the priorities in the draft ReCAP will make a difference to reduce emissions and prepare for climate change in our region. 11% neither agreed or disagreed, and 28% disagreed or strongly disagreed that the draft plan will make a difference.

Survey respondents were invited to comment on their level of support or otherwise for the outcomes and the actions in the draft ReCAP. Several key themes of feedback emerged through the analysis.

Key themes of supportive feedback included the following:

• Significant support for climate actions including: ‒ Protecting and enhancing green space, native vegetation and biodiversity

• Promoting climate resilient and low emission development
• Reducing council and community emissions
• Educating, engaging and supporting the community
• Responding to climate risk to protect the community and save on long-term costs
• Improving sustainability of transport systems.

• Concern that actions are not specific, measurable or time bound.
• Support for strong and timely climate action.
• Acknowledgement of the strong link between acting on climate change and supporting community wellbeing and liveability

Key themes of unsupportive feedback included the following:

• Climate denialism.
• Lack of understanding about why councils are acting on climate change.
• Concerns that development is contributing to climate change and a lack of resilience, and that Councils are not doing enough to change this.
• Concern about the impact of the plan on rates or cost of living

You can view a copy of the Draft Plan here and a copy of the engagement summary report here.