Biodiversity Strategy - Gosford City Council - NSW Government

3.3 Biodiversity Strategy
To protect and promote biodiversity Council needs to adopt a multi-facetted approach. The
following six key strategies are aimed at providing this framework. The include:
3.3.1 Protect and Conserve Biodiversity and Maintain Ecological Processes
3.3.2 Integrate Biodiversity Conservation & Natural Resource Management
3.3.3 Educate & Involve/Consult the Community
3.3.4 Collect Information and Improve Knowledge and Research
3.3.5 Identify, Prevent & Mitigate the Cause of Bio-Threatening Processes
3.3.6 Allocate Resource and Develop a Biodiversity Operational Plan
3.3.1 Protect and Conserve Biodiversity and Maintain Ecological Processes
One of the primary objectives of the conservation assessment is to identify areas and
features of high biodiversity significance and to advise on appropriate conservation
measures.
This approach includes:
Actions
• Providing ways to identify and protect high conservation areas such as
wetlands, endangered ecological communities, hanging swamps, regional and
locally significant vegetation.
• Incorporating conservation measures for reserves and Coastal Open Space
System (COSS) and protection of ecologically significant areas and identified
wildlife corridors and vegetated linkages.
• Encompassing a full range of ecosystems capable of maintaining biodiversity
in the public reserve systems.
• Developing biodiversity management plans for the reserve systems. These
plans are to be implemented and regularly reviewed to work towards providing
a representation and viable samples of all major ecosystems.
• Work towards biodiversity conservation to be considered as part of Council's
strategic planning, operations and controls.
• Take into consideration the objectives, strategies and actions of the National
Biodiversity and Climate Change Action Plan 2004 - 2007
1 Enable biodiversity conservation to be taken into consideration in Council's
strategic planning.
2 Require development consent for vegetation clearing/underscrubbing on all
non-urban land.
3 Environmental zoned lands need to be retained with current minimum lots area
standards to enable the lot sizes to allow sufficient space for land uses to
occur without loss of biodiversity.
4 The land zoning and permitted land uses within identified vegetation and
wildlife corridors and riparian habitats need to reflect the biodiversity values.
5 Consider biodiversity criteria for conserving areas of high biodiversity working
towards maintenance and enhancement of existing biodiversity as a key priority
with the aim of no net loss in development assessments and future LEPs.
Biodiversity Strategy Page 21