An Urban Forest Horizon Scan in Canberra, Australia. Report for the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub

Biodiversity project team held three horizon scanning workshops in Melbourne, Canberra and Perth, Australia and a fourth workshop in Lund, Sweden during 2018.

The goal of the workshops was to engage practitioners, managers and academics in a creative process of reflection and exploration of the diversity and complexity of future opportunities and challenges facing the urban forest. Large scale challenges such as mass migration, urban densification and climate change are forecast to affect the urban forest, as well as systematic challenges in our understanding of urban forests and how they are managed and planned. By framing the workshops as imagining the city in the year 2100, participants were asked to put aside a focus on current problems, and instead scan the urban horizon for new ideas. The creative process allowed participants to reflect on new directions, to provoke and provide challenging insights, as well as to question assumptions, away from the constraints of their regular day-to-day contexts. Working in dynamic conversations, people raised ideas that were then expanded and tested by their colleagues in ways that could not have been possible in a desk-top-analysis. The collaborative workshop process provided a space for practitioners and academics to discuss unusual ideas in-depth in creative and transdisciplinary conversations.