Cape York Healthy Country Plan

We’re in the process of updating the Cape York Natural Resource Management Plan and we’re keen to get your views. Why does this matter? We’ll it’s your collective opportunity to tell us and the government about what is important to the people of Cape York – from a natural resources perspective.

We’re calling this plan the Cape York Healthy Country Plan, because it’s a plan about keeping Cape York Healthy for future generations, so your kids can enjoy the healthy land, freshwater, biodiversity and coastal resources of Cape York that we all benefit from now.

Cape York NRM’s job is to help facilitate a process to ensure that the people of Cape York have a say. We’ve reviewed the old Cape York NRM Regional plan 2016-2020, and taken a look at the Healthy Country Plans and other plans across Cape York to try to capture the important points and to bring them all together in a cohesive picture that everyone can understand. But consultation and meeting people face to face during these Covid-19 times is challenging!

So, we’re trying something a little different. To kick off the “consultation process” process we’re going to try to determine the most important natural assets, threats and resource management priorities for Cape York. We’ve tried to make this easy for everyone by providing a simple online survey with some drop-down tables.

This little survey asks three questions

1. What are the three most important natural assets in your area that you care about? Natural assets – are the natural features that you care about. Natural assets can be: savanna, sea turtles, rainforest, good pasture, good soils, clean fresh water and wetlands, mangrove areas or lots of fish.
2. What are the top three things threats, damaging or impacting your natural assets? Threats are all those things that impact the health or destroy the natural assets you care about. Threats might be: pigs wrecking turtle nests, of too much bank erosion in creeks, bad fires, and weeds, or not enough capacity or access to country to manage the threats, 
3. And finally, what are your top three recommendations to improve the health of the natural assets you care about? This is all about the strategies and actions that we take to reduce the threats and improve the health of our natural assets. This might be things like: feral pig control, or doing early dry season burning or intensive weed management or better managing cattle access to waterways or increasing the capacity of traditional owners to access and manage Country.

If you can’t find the natural assets or threat that are important to you, then we’ve provided an extra box so that you can add the thing that is most important to you.

Access the survey here: cli.re/Qm9xvQ

We will put the little survey out for two weeks for people to have their say and then we’ll compile all the results into a simple table so that everyone can take a look at the results from across the Cape. We’ll then hold a zoom call in early May, so that we can discuss these results with people that are interested.

Our final step will be to hold some face to face or phone meetings (depending on Covid-19 restrictions) in May for those residents that didn’t have a chance to have their say and to do some final refinements based on their input to feed into the plan.

If you have any questions, please contact (me) Geoff on 0476 667 170 or email geoff.lipsettmoore@capeyorknrm.com.au