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Australia’s new National Environment Protection Agency begins operating this week (from 1 July 2026), the centrepiece of the biggest overhaul of Australian environmental law in more than 25 years. It will make assessment pathways faster, offset markets more efficient and approvals quicker.
What it will not do is change the underlying belief that development and biodiversity have to compete and that planning exists to broker the balance. That assumption is so deeply embedded in how Australian cities are built that it is rarely questioned. It should be.
Instead of asking how to better manage the trade-off, we should be asking why we accept it as inevitable.
There is a concept in First Nations philosophy that has no clean translation into the language of planning policy or development law.
Design for Country is not a design aesthetic, nor a biodiversity offset mechanism, nor a green roof requirement. It is a fundamentally different way of understanding who a place belongs to. Country, including land, water, sky and all that lives within them, is shared between species, not owned by one. To design for Country is to design for all of its inhabitants equally, human and non-human alike.
That idea sits in profound tension with the way contemporary urban planning systems manage the natural world.
Across Australia, biodiversity is treated primarily as something to be conserved, mapped, measured, offset and, where possible, kept separate from the built environment.
Environmental protection zones buffer wetlands from development. Ecological corridors are drawn around remnant vegetation. Threatened species trigger assessment requirements. The underlying logic is one of containment, nature over there, people over here and it has defined how we build cities for generations.
Design for Country does not ask how we protect nature from cities. It asks how cities become part of nature.
Design for Country asks an entirely different question. It does not ask how we protect nature from cities. It asks how cities become part of nature and how the built environment is shaped to accommodate the full community of species that have always called a place home.
This is not greenwashing or biophilic design tokenism. It is a structural reorientation, from human-centred urbanism to multi-species urbanism, where the needs and movement patterns of birds, insects, reptiles and mammals are as legible in a site plan as car parking and pedestrian flows.
The collision between this philosophy and current planning frameworks is not merely philosophical, it is deeply practical.
Planning systems are built on the premise that development and biodiversity exist in a trade-off relationship, that every house built will displace habitat and the job of the regulator is to manage that displacement fairly. Offset mechanisms, trigger thresholds, and protection zones are the instruments of that management. Conservation assessments often arrive late in the design process and dictate form, footprint, and massing – producing development that is neither good urbanism nor genuine habitat.
In practice, planning systems produce what might be called remnant by default with fragments of vegetation surviving the development process through assessment thresholds rather than design intent. Isolated from one another, disconnected from the broader landscape, and rarely subject to ongoing management, these spaces deliver marginal biodiversity value at best.
The opportunity cost is significant. The same land, incorporated into the development design from the outset with deliberate attention to connectivity, species composition and long-term stewardship, could function as genuine habitat rather than an ecological footnote.
This is not a new idea. First Nations peoples have managed Country as an integrated, living system for tens of thousands of years, shaping landscape, the relationship to species composition and ecological function through continuous, deliberate stewardship rather than periodic intervention.
Multi-species urban design challenges that hierarchy at its foundation. If a residential precinct is designed from the outset around the seasonal patterns, the movement corridors of local marsupials, the nesting habits of hollow-dependent birds, and the foraging needs of native bees, it does not simply reduce biodiversity impact, it dissolves the premise that impact is inevitable. The design is no longer managing a trade-off, it is refusing to accept one.
It also benefits human residents directly. There is plenty of evidence to show that exposure to nature supports physical and mental wellbeing. Additionally tree canopies, green corridors and natural waterways make neighbourhoods more comfortable and climate resilient.
But planning systems on their own cannot drive this shift in mindset and arguably should not try. The deeper problem is one of literacy.
Most people who live in Australian cities have no meaningful relationship with the non-human species that share their suburb. They do not know which bird’s nests are in the street trees, which reptiles move through the grass verge, or what the local creek system supports.
Without that knowledge, even the most ecologically sophisticated urban design may be seen as irrelevant or inconvenient rather than as an invitation to a richer way of inhabiting place.
Current urban applications also tend to favour monocultures or provisions for “urban adapted species” promoting little biodiversity in these spaces.
This is where urban design and education must work together. Designing for Country is not only about where buildings go and how green space is configured, it is about creating environments that make the presence of other species visible, legible, and valued. They teach people, simply by living in a place, that they are not the only ones who belong there.
Interpretive signage matters less than a design that makes species encounter unavoidable, such as a footpath that passes through a monitored habitat corridor, a stormwater feature that doubles as frog habitat, a verge planting that attracts species people have never seen in a suburb before.
The planning system will need to catch up. Zoning frameworks, development assessment processes and biodiversity legislation were not written with multi-species cohabitation in mind.
But the more urgent work is cultural, to shift the assumption that urban development and living nature are inherently in opposition.
Design for Country offers a different starting point based on reciprocity rather than conquest and mitigation. Cities successfully designed for the benefit of all inhabitants are a planning vision worth building towards.
