Page 461 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 22 March 2022
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Sustainable Building and Construction) (5.17): On 10 March I was privileged to attend the 2021 Landcare Awards, which had been postponed from last year due to COVID. It was a fantastic evening in celebration of the Landcare movement and acknowledged some truly outstanding contributions.
Here in the ACT there are over 70 groups and thousands of individuals helping to preserve and restore our precious natural systems, whether in our nature parks, our suburbs or on farmland, and it was great to see their work recognised. The winners of many of these awards will now go forward as nominees for the 2022 National Landcare Awards in August.
At the awards night we saw the recognition of partnerships like the ACT Healthy Waterways project with the Southern ACT Catchment Group, the Ginninderra Catchment Group, the Molonglo Conservation Group and the ACT government. The awards recognised the importance of World Water Day, and there was recognition of the importance of caring for the land in an agricultural context—which was where Landcare first began—in an award given to Mount Majura Vineyard.
Indigenous land management, citizen scientists, the involvement of young people, community groups and youth leadership were all highlighted in these awards. I would like to highlight something else too, which is that the benefits of this work do not just flow in one direction towards our much-loved Australian landscapes and ecosystems. The land gives back to the people who care for it.
Last year KPMG released a report suggesting that Landcare volunteers obtain significant physical and mental health benefits from their work, as well as health cost savings of around $400 per person, which equates to over $57 million a year nationally. That is more than 140,000 people living better, happier and healthier lives, thanks to their work with Landcare. It is now one of the largest volunteer movements in Australia.
As Doug Humann, the Chair of Landcare Australia, has said:
For decades, those involved in Landcare have testified to a greater sense of self, both physically and mentally, resulting from an enhanced link with their local environment. This in turn has boosted community wellbeing and it has long been the desire of the Landcare movement to quantify the significance of these benefits. Clearly, these ground-breaking new figures speak for themselves and the importance of volunteering and engaging with Landcare activities within the community.
Those figures include 46 per cent of respondents reporting a clear improvement to their mental wellbeing and 93 per cent feeling a connection to the land, with 90 per cent experiencing a stronger connection to their community.
The ACT government is interested to examine how environmental volunteering benefits us here in Canberra, as well as how it can be improved and the potential opportunities that we are failing to capture. The Standing Committee on Environment, Climate Change and Biodiversity is currently working on this and is open to
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