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January 29, 2026 — 11:30am
Colonial maps of Sydney show a city with vast waterways now lost beneath roads and buildings.
The Tank Stream, the heritage-listed stormwater drain beneath Sydney CBD that was once the area’s primary freshwater source, is one example. But across Sydney, natural streams were covered over, redirected and cut off as the city grew.
However, as science consultancy KBR’s Domenic Svejkar puts it: “Water does what it wants.”
“No matter how much we build all this stuff, it erodes and it degrades, and water just goes back to its normal, natural flow,” the regenerative systems designer said.
Canals, stormwater drains and concrete gutters lead to pollutant concentration, flooding, soil degradation and biodiversity loss.
As Sydney grapples with a warming climate, Svejkar believes “daylighting” hidden waterways in the city’s suburbs could help cool the city down, creating more tree canopy space and habitat for wildlife, as well as reducing flood risk by working with the city’s natural waterways, rather than against them.
It is one of the big ideas for conserving Sydney’s environment submitted to the Committee for Sydney’s annual Sydney Summit, supported by the Herald, to be held on February 6.
Svejkar said successful daylighting projects such as those in New Zealand, where 200 metres of pipe was removed and pedestrian bridges installed to resurface the La Rosa stream in West Auckland, could offer inspiration.
“We need to ask: what does it look like to design with country, with water, for place, with people?”
From bringing the city’s waterways above the ground’s surface to burying power poles deep below, here are three more big ideas for Sydney’s environment, submitted to the summit.
Taking seawalls offshore
Seawalls are proving insufficient in the fight against sea-level rise. What’s more, they can be an eyesore.
The UNSW Water Research Laboratory’s Dr William Glamore and Dr Andrew Dansie, in conjunction with UNESCO, propose building “floating seascapes” to meet this challenge in an eco-friendly way, by embedding mangroves on harbour pontoons.
“[It is] a floating solution that gives us time to prepare for rising sea levels [and] bring back nature and biodiversity into the urban environment,” Dansie said.
These seascapes would dampen wave power, clean harbour water, provide habitats and act as a carbon sink. The floating platforms would also include walkways linking parts of the harbour for education and leisure, he said.
Dansie said Farm Cove, on the foreshore of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, could be a good place to start. There, sea-level rise is causing waves to wash over the seawall, introducing damaging salt to nearby gardens.
While the idea is not at a pilot stage yet – “more cerebral”, said Dansie – lessons learnt from mangrove regeneration projects in Fiji could assist with planning.
“Once we get the science and the engineering right and have mangroves not just surviving but thriving on these floating platforms … it can be part of the suite of development tools that engineers and town planners use, across Sydney and beyond,” he said.
Ditching power poles
Urban Design Association NSW vice president Tanya Vincent says Sydney is stuck in the 19th century when it comes to electricity infrastructure.
“Sydneysiders … like to think of themselves as very modern, and yet you walk outside and you look up [at] telegraph poles.”
Vincent said Sydney needs to drive its electricity wires underground instead.
Aesthetic appeal is the least of Vincent’s concerns; street trees can fight urban heat as the climate changes but power lines limit new plants to three metres in height. “They are not going to be large trees with [the] deep shade that brings the benefits.”
Underground power lines would also reduce the risk extreme weather and bushfires pose to energy infrastructure, and decrease wildlife electrocutions.
When it comes to undergrounding power, Sydney is lagging other parts of Australia, Vincent said.
The Western Australian government has led a cost-sharing arrangement with local governments and electricity companies to underground power since 1996, which has removed overground power infrastructure for 100,000 properties in the state.
The success interstate example shows that power undergrounding needs a “sustained program at a large scale … of consistent, methodical, incremental change”, she said, prioritising areas vulnerable to bushfire and storm damage, urban heat islands and socioeconomic need.
Communal composting
In community gardens, apartment-dwelling Sydneysiders tend to flowers and vegetable patches, but what about finding a way to share the other benefits of having a backyard?
In addition to daylighting urban waterways, Svejkar is also an advocate for “creative communal kerbside composting”: community-designed compost bins on public streets and verges.
Svejkar said communal composting would be very useful in high-density areas where apartment-dwellers don’t have access to backyard space, reducing waste going into landfill, regenerating soils, and educating the public.
Locally designed community compost units could complement the FOGO (Food organics and garden organics) schemes being introduced by many Sydney councils. But instead of being “black bins that sit on the road”, they would have a creative spin, Svejkar said.
Implementation would start with identifying pilot locations, bringing together local councils, developers and waste management providers to work out the practical process.
Then, community workshops to design each kerbside compost bin, Svejkar said, praising the work of Chippendale resident Michael Mobbs, whose “coolseat” bench compost bins are designed for inner-city streets.
The Sydney Summit is on Friday, February 6, at the ICC.
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