GreenGrid - a win-win for the environment and the community

GreenGrid, our award-winning partnership with TransGrid, has just received a new injection of vital funding. The GreenGrid partnership has been engaging farmers and the wider community in the Southern Tablelands of NSW since 2003, to conserve, grow and plant native vegetation, and improve understanding and practice of natural resource management.

The new funds from TransGrid will enable us to continue to build on the thirteen years of successful on ground works already undertaken in the region – a great win for the environment and the local community.

The GreenGrid program is Greening Australia’s longest continuous running project in the ACT and NSW.

Some of the project’s significant achievements to date include:

Protecting and rehabilitating over 2,200 ha of land

• 2,300 km of direct seeding
• 350,000 seedlings planted
• 500km of fencing

The key to GreenGrid’s success has been its flexible approach to achieving outcomes for biodiversity in a production-focused landscape. A large proportion of the native vegetation of the Southern Tablelands is highly fragmented due to the impact of disturbances such as grazing, cropping and pasture improvement. GreenGrid is working to reconnect the landscape by helping landholders to establish shelterbelts and revegetate waterways, creating stepping stones enabling native wildlife to move more easily across the landscape, while at the same time providing protection for livestock and reducing soil erosion.

Significant environmental outcomes have also been achieved through the direct engagement of landholders, community groups and schools on key issues such as water quality, sustainability and landscape-scale biodiversity through a series of events. This has helped to build a spirit of environmental cooperation between TransGrid, local landholders and the community.

In 2011, GreenGrid received the NSW Premier’s Public Sector Sustainability Award, and was a finalist in the United Nations Association’s World Environment Day Awards and the Banksia Awards.

This year, GreenGrid has branched out northwards to provide biodiversity incentive projects around Armidale and Tamworth. The partnership now includes the Armidale Tree Group, a community organisation that has been helping to restore the biodiversity of the New England area since 1983.

We hope that the project will continue to expand in coming years with support from TransGrid and other project partners.

For more information about GreenGrid, please send us an online query.