The recent Stop the Chop campaign run by The Tree Council and supported by NZ Arb has sent a very clear message to the Government that protection of urban trees on private land is an issue that New Zealanders care deeply about.

In a period of 10 days the Stop the Chop website collected and sent 2,348 individual submissions from all over the country to the Environment Select Committee supporting The Tree Council’s submission, and explaining why protection of trees on private land in urban areas is a priority for inclusion in the proposed Natural and Built Environments Bill.

This represented one-third of all submissions received by the Select Committee on the draft Bill and is an unprecedented response on a single issue.

The Tree Council will be presenting its oral submission to the Select Committee at approx 10.15am on Thursday 19 August via video link, due to the Covid19 lockdown.

“We will be calling on the Government to require all councils to protect urban trees on private land in this Bill” said The Tree Council’s Secretary Dr Mels Barton.

“It is no longer acceptable to the public to enable the uncontrolled slaughter of our large urban trees for personal financial gain to continue. This legislation needs to move quickly to protect what we have left and not leave it as an open-ended option that councils may or may not wish to implement at some point in the future. That point is now. We must Stop the Chop while we still have some large urban trees left to protect for future generations.”

The public is welcome to tune in to the Select Committee hearing on Thursday morning to hear and support The Tree Council’s submission via the live Facebook feed on the Environment Committee’s page https://www.facebook.com/environmentSCNZ/

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