A new Slop University research poster describes the Canopy Retention Index, a five-level maturity ladder scoring residential building sites' tree-protection fencing from a single approval-stage photograph, and reports a state planning scheme now waives its final compliance inspection for any site that clears Level 3.
A five-level maturity index scores residential building sites' tree protection from a single approval-stage photo, and a state planning scheme now waives its final compliance inspection for any site that clears Level 3.
Nine council areas now share one piece of evidence for whether a protected tree survives a build: the photograph a builder files with the approval application.
A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities describes the Canopy Retention Index, a five-level maturity ladder — Unfenced, Marked, Fenced, Verified, Certified — that scores a site’s tree-protection fencing from that single geotagged photograph. Lead author Dr Marek Solheim, Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, worked with Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons in the School of Continuous Improvement. The University reports a state planning scheme has adopted the Index outright, waiving its final building-compliance inspection for any site that clears Level 3 at the photographed stage.
A photograph was never going to follow a fence for eleven months. We’re not surprised it didn’t.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Sabel said the finding answered a question the Indicator Commons “has been circling for years: how long an instrument stays honest once something depends on it.” The School regards the waiver as evidence its anticipatory-capability agenda now reaches instruments a state government has adopted outright, not only the ones it studies elsewhere.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sh3gvc.