Geelong's green push stacks up against Glasgow and Malmö, but the clock is ticking

Geelong has outpaced several comparable post-industrial cities on rooftop solar penetration but is falling short on urban tree canopy targets and coastal adaptation spending, according to a benchmarking assessment circulated this week by the Barwon Regional Sustainability Alliance ahead of its annual forum at Deakin University's Waterfront Campus on July 17.

The findings land at a charged moment. Property prices across the Surf Coast corridor, from Torquay down to Anglesea, are softening after years of pandemic-era pressure, but development applications in coastal zones are still running at roughly double their pre-2020 rate. That combination is straining the City of Greater Geelong's planning resources and sharpening debates about how much built-up land the region can absorb before its environmental buffers buckle.

Where Geelong leads, and where it doesn't

The benchmarking report compared Geelong against six cities of broadly similar size and industrial heritage: Glasgow, Malmö, Newcastle upon Tyne, Wollongong, Hamilton in Ontario, and Bilbao. On residential solar, Geelong performs strongly. Roughly 38 percent of detached dwellings in the City of Greater Geelong local government area now carry rooftop panels, a figure the Alliance puts well above Glasgow's 11 percent and Malmö's 14 percent, though both those cities compensate with district heating networks fed by biomass and waste-heat recovery that Geelong has no equivalent of.

The canopy gap is more confronting. Geelong's urban tree cover sits at around 12 percent of total city area, against a target of 20 percent the council adopted in its 2021 Urban Forest Strategy. Malmö has been planting aggressively since its 2018 green infrastructure plan and now sits at 24 percent. Glasgow, once notorious for concrete-heavy post-war housing estates, lifted its canopy from 16 to 21 percent between 2015 and 2024 through a dedicated £40 million ($78 million AUD) program tied to its post-industrial regeneration agenda, the same city that has recently drawn attention for using social intervention models to cut violent crime.

Closer to home, the Geelong Botanic Gardens on Eastern Park is central to propagation efforts for the council's street-tree program, which planted 1,840 trees across suburbs including Newtown, Belmont and Corio in the 2024-25 financial year. The Gardens' nursery supplies roughly 60 percent of those plantings. The Corio Bay foreshore restoration project, managed jointly by the City of Greater Geelong and Parks Victoria, has revegetated 4.7 kilometres of shoreline since 2022 using locally sourced coastal saltmarsh and she-oak species.

Coastal resilience: the funding question

The Surf Coast Shire has committed $3.2 million over four years to coastal adaptation works, including dune stabilisation between Torquay's Zeally Bay and Jan Juc. That figure sounds substantial until you compare it to Newcastle upon Tyne's £28 million ($54 million AUD) coastal resilience package running from 2023 to 2028, or Wollongong City Council's $11.4 million program announced last year. Population differences partly explain the gap, but climate modellers at Deakin's Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation have flagged that sea-level rise projections for the Bellarine Peninsula now track toward the higher end of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's AR6 scenarios.

The City Deal, the $381 million federal-state-local investment framework signed in 2022, contains a $15 million allocation for sustainability infrastructure, but community groups including the Geelong Environment Council argue most of that is absorbed by stormwater upgrades rather than active greening or coastal works. The federal government has not publicly indicated whether a second-tranche City Deal negotiation is likely before 2027.

For residents and investors watching the Surf Coast and Bellarine markets, the practical upshot is this: check whether any property you're considering sits within the Coastal Inundation Overlay or the Significant Landscape Overlay before signing anything. Both overlays impose development restrictions and, in some cases, require site-specific climate risk assessments that can add months and thousands of dollars to any planning application. The Deakin Waterfront Campus forum on July 17 is open to the public and will include a session specifically on overlay mapping and what it means for homeowners. Registration is free through the Barwon Regional Sustainability Alliance website.