In Melbourne's sprawling western suburbs, a lack of tree cover can make the summer heat unbearable.
The people who live there say they've looked on as much of their natural space has been lost to development.
But work is underway to build a greener, cooler future.
For Sophia Pashalis, spending time in her garden is a form of therapy.
"I will get out there at six thirty in the morning," she explains.
"I have a smaller garden because I have my trees, I absolutely adore my trees."
The keen gardener says she finds it calming to potter about, assessing which plants need clipping and which don't.
But she knows more than keeping her happy, her garden and trees play an even greater role in the quality of her life.
"The more trees you have, the cooler the place will be, the better the oxygen we will have, the trees will bring in the moisture," she explains.
At a meeting of members of the West Sunshine Multicultural Senior Citizens Club, she is one of the fiercest advocates for more trees in her suburb.
Here, a lack of trees is a big issue for residents.
In 2018, scientists used aerial mapping to calculate tree canopy across Melbourne.
The study showed the western suburbs averaged less than 6 per cent tree canopy, while the eastern suburbs averaged around 26 per cent.
The local government area of Brimbank, which takes in Sunshine West, also experiences what scientists call the "heat island" effect in summer, where areas with a lot of hard surfaces like concrete, and not much shade, can be much hotter than surrounding areas.
A Monash University study found a lack of green space in the suburb of Sunshine was responsible for raising temperatures by up to 13 degrees Celsius.
It's something the senior citizens club members are all aware of — at their meeting, each person describes their own strategies to stay cool in summer.
"I stay inside and drink fluids and try my best not to go out because the heat gets to me," says Magdalen Debono.
"I do find in the heat I get very sick so I try not to go out," adds Mary Debono.
Mary Rose Borg surprises the room with her heat tactics.
"I close the whole house with the shutters," she explains.
"And I have no clothes on."
The room howls with laughter.
Urban transformation
As the group chats, themes emerge.
Many here struggle in the heat of summer, most close themselves inside their homes and rely on air conditioning to get through.
"But with the way electricity is going up at the moment, I don't know how some of these old people are going to afford it," Mary Debono says.
"There is going to be a lot more sick people calling for an ambulance because they are going to be turning off the air conditioning because they cannot afford it.
"There is going to be nowhere for them to go."
Her friend Maria Runcevich is worried about the summer heat.
She lives in nearby Deer Park and says her neighbourhood has little green space and few trees.
"You can't go anywhere, you are just stuck inside the house, or the shopping centre," she says.
Ms Runcevich moved to Deer Park from the more leafy eastern suburbs of Melbourne.
She says in Deer Park "there is concrete everywhere" and the lack of trees and shade makes it harder to manage her asthma.
All of her friends agree that they want more trees and parks in their neighbourhoods.
But, if anything, they say they can see the opposite occurring.
Here, urban development has caught up, transforming a once-industrial area.
Townhouses and apartment blocks are replacing older suburban homes on larger blocks of land.
Members of the senior citizens group, many of whom have lived in the area for decades after migrating to Australia, say trees are knocked down on private land for these redevelopments.
The group includes councillor Sam David — a veteran of local politics in the west.
In this meeting, a chat about trees has turned into a bit of democracy round table, with questions fired at the councillor.
He says some of the problems were seeded many years ago.
"If you go back to the early days of Sunshine council — if a subdivision came along they are entitled to 5 per cent of that sub division … for open space," he explains.
But Cr David says developers could instead choose to pay a levy to council in lieu of providing that open space, and that's often what happened.
"That is the reason why everyone is now mentioning there is no open space," he says.
While he says council is investing significant sums in tree planting, parts of Sunshine simply don't have enough parks and open space.
And that, he says, can be a difficult problem to fix once an area is already developed.
"What do you do? You can't just compulsorily buy houses and make it into an open space," he says.
His fellow senior citizens listen closely, pushing for answers.
They insist more can be done to fix this problem which has been years in the making.
Killer heat
Melbourne GP Jennifer Conway is a member of Doctors for the Environment, an advocacy organisation focused on how our environment impacts our health.
"There is lots of evidence about how important green space is to our health — both physical and mental," she says.
She says green spaces make it easier for people to exercise and be healthy, provide shade and improve our mental health and that trees play a vital role in helping to keep us cool during hot days.
Around the world, she explains, heatwaves can cause illness and death.
In Victoria, a government assessment of the 2009 heatwave which preceded the Black Saturday bushfires found there were an estimated 374 excess deaths.
There were 173 lives lost during the bushfires that followed.
She says the young, the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions are most vulnerable during heatwaves, especially in urban areas where the heat-island effect occurs.
"Say with little children for instance, they might have a viral illness so they are running a little fever, and then they are living in a very hot house that can't be cooled down, so that is going to exacerbate the dehydration," she says.
She says the body usually sweats to cool down, but a person can reach a tipping point where they stop sweating and just overheat.
"The ones who end up in hospital, they are very dehydrated and they are overheating so they can be confused," she says.
"It puts a terrible strain on the heart and lungs."
And with a warming climate, she worries about how the country's healthcare system will cope.
It's why she wants governments and town planners to consider the health consequences of housing developments which don't have many trees or parks close by.
"If they don't, the impacts on human health … will continue and will probably only exacerbate as the planet heats up," Dr Conway says.
Building a forest
When Geoffrey Mitchelmore's children were growing up, the banks of the nearby Kororoit Creek in Brooklyn, just south of Sunshine, were off-limits.
"It was a dreadful place, it was weeds, rubbish, rabbits, snakes and a drug-dealing area," he says.
"My kids were not allowed to go down there, it was just too damn dangerous."
The suburb of Brooklyn is bordered by major roads and heavy industry.
It bothered Mr Mitchelmore that the area didn't have any proper parklands and the creek was in a bad way.
So his wife told him he better do something about it.
And that is what he has spent the past 20 years doing.
Mr Mitchelmore and the volunteers at Friends of Lower Kororoit Creek have helped to plant 60,000 trees along the creek, creating an urban forest right in the middle of industry and suburbia.
On the day he meets the ABC, a woman arrives to share a picnic lunch with her elderly mother, a man pushes his granddaughter in her pram towards the play area and a couple and their border collie power walk past.
"The whole tone of the area has changed," Mr Mitchelmore says proudly.
But, he explains, it was a long journey to get this far.
It all started when he put an ad in the paper asking for volunteers for a community-tree-planting day.
"We planted probably 200 to 300 trees," he says.
"Probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Probably had the wrong type of tree.
"But we planted them and had a good time."
But it was years of building alliances within government and with surrounding businesses that helped the community group transform the area.
With help from Hobsons Bay City Council and the Victorian government, a strategy was drawn up for the creek and plans were made to create a green corridor going all the way from Port Phillip Bay to Caroline Springs in the outer north-west.
Major donations from businesses along the creek helped fund tree planting and a bike path through the parkland.
Mr Mitchelmore hopes the work of his group can be an example to others of what can be achieved in the west.
'Ambitious' plans
The councils covering Melbourne's tree-starved west say they're battling to turn things around.
Hobsons Bay City Council, which covers the Brooklyn area, says it doesn't collect data on the number of trees lost to urban development.
But it says residents and developers do need to get a permit to destroy larger trees.
Mayor Tony Briffa says the council has also planted 17,000 semi-mature trees since 2019.
That, the mayor explains, is part of a larger strategy to boost shade in the region.
"We developed an urban-forest strategy that aims to increase our canopy cover to 30 per cent by 2040," she says.
"It was at just 7.5 per cent in 2018, so it's an ambitious target but we are working really hard to meet it."
Brimbank City Council, which covers Sunshine West, wants to boost its tree canopy from 6 per cent to 30 per cent.
Mayor Bruce Lancashire says in the six years he's been on council, it has lifted its tree canopy to 10 per cent.
"For us, that is a huge jump in those six years," he says.
The mayor says the council is investing $2 million a year in tree planting, which translates to roughly 26,000 new trees in the ground each year.
Cr Lancashire says part of the reason the western suburbs have such low tree canopy figures is because of the geology of the area.
"The western suburbs are a large basalt plain from volcanoes laying out the basalt many years ago," he says.
"And it is very much a grassland plain and large areas of it didn't have many trees in the first place compared to the eastern suburbs where you have the hills and the higher rainfall and often better soil."
The mayor agrees councils of the past may not have insisted on enough open green space when housing estates were built.
He says he understands the concerns of residents, who worry about trees being lost, but says greater housing density is part of the Victorian planning scheme for areas like West Sunshine.
"One of the things we have done [for new developments] is introduce a requirement for the planting of two medium trees in front yards and a small tree in the backyard," he says.
The challenge, says the mayor, is not just planting new trees, but also trying to keep the trees already planted.
Planning the future
RMIT's Thami Croeser is an urban planner who studies ways to make cities greener.
He says there's something of a tug of war going on around trees.
Communities are losing trees on private land to urban development — at the same time councils are trying to plant more on public land.
"It can really be one of those two steps back, one step forward things," he says.
While he acknowledges trees can't always be saved during housing builds, he thinks Australia can do better at building in more green space to keep our suburbs cooler.
"If you are able to plant along your west-facing facade in particular, that really helps keep the sun off your home and it means your walls don't soak up as much heat. But if you don't have space for that, you can actually grow a creeper up your wall," he says.
He wants to see changes to the Victorian planning scheme which would require housing developments to have things like a wall or roof garden where there isn't space for trees.
And he wants councils to get more out of suburban areas.
"So we can plant up medians, we can plant up trees in a way that they are next to a curb, or an inlet so they actually get watered by stormwater, studies have shown that grows canopy at double the speed."
He says the community needs to start thinking of trees as part of the "basic infrastructure" for a city.
"In the same way that you wouldn't build a suburb without drains, without schools, without a local police station, you should also be building it with trees," he says.
"It is just one of those basics of an urban area."
The Victorian government said $315 million was being spent to create 6,500 hectares of new and upgraded parks and trails across Victoria, including two new parks in Melbourne's west.
"We're protecting and expanding our urban tree canopy as part of Plan Melbourne by changing planning provisions to increase tree numbers and ensure future housing growth is done in a way that enhances livability and character of suburbs," they said.
"We're also planting more than 500,000 trees in Melbourne's west to provide more shade, green spaces, drive down pollution and improve biodiversity."
Big things grow
For the past 10 years there has been a small, but highly active group of public servants bringing together councils across the west, water authorities, state government departments, community groups and federal government funding — all with the aim of putting more trees in the ground.
"It was set up because of the disparity between the haves and have-nots in the leafy south-eastern suburbs compared to the west," says the Greening The West secretariat Darren Coughlan.
"The health stats told us that so many medical issues like heart disease, diabetes, obesity and mental illness are much higher than the state average in the west."
He says tree planting was a way to try and improve those statistics.
The alliance officially launched in 2013 with a tree planting outside Whitten Oval — the home of the Western Bulldogs AFL club.
"One of the first projects was the Western Bulldogs football club gave us $7,000 and we planted a number of trees around Whitten Oval," Mr Coughlan remembers.
Those trees he says are now thriving and have formed a little urban forest.
They are among the more than 1 million trees that Greening The West helped to plant across Melbourne's west.
That figure was reached after councils across the west committed to the task, and the federal government put a million dollars into funding a "green army" of young people to help plant trees.
The project has been celebrated in Australia and overseas, even receiving recognition from the United Nations.
But back in the western suburbs, what has the impact of all this tree planting been?
Mr Coughlan says an updated mapping project in 2020 showed tree canopy right across the west had improved by about 1 per cent.
It sounds like a small figure for all of that work.
But Mr Coughlan says he is encouraged by that result.
"For the first time it was good to know we are heading in the right direction," he says.
Credits:
- Reporting: Elise Kinsella
- Photography: Danielle Bonica and Peter Drought
- Digital production: Kate Higgins and Joseph Dunstan
