November 19, 2020
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CGI. Thinking globally. Acting Locally.
TREES PLANTED
500
CGI is one of the largest IT and business consulting services firms on the planet. It has been going strong since 1976, including establishing a strong presence in Australia, and currently employs around 78,000 people. One of CGI’s strengths is in thinking globally while acting locally. Just as CGI brings its collective international expertise to provide quality service to individual clients in Australia, so it looks for ways to offset its environmental impact that make a real-life difference.
CGI has partnered with Fifteen Trees this year to plant 500 trees as part of the Westgate biodiversity project. The plan was to let the employees get down and dirty with the seedlings, part of CGI’s culture of encouraging sustainable thinking across its operations. Unfortunately, for covid reasons, this wasn’t possible in the end. Instead, Westgate Park volunteers made sure the trees were bedded down securely over the winter and just last week got out to plant the trees.
CGI also covered the cost of tree guards for all its trees, which was a huge help. Establishing young trees takes more than leaning on a shovel and crossing your fingers. To weather their first summer, seedlings usually need tree guards. The staked plastic sleeves provide protection from grazing wildlife, harsh winds, and more. The microclimate created by the plastic gives the seedling the best possible opportunity to establish a strong tap root, which exponentially increases their chances of long-term survival.
Westgate Bio has been planting adjacent to the Westgate Bridge, in one of the only salt lakes left in inner urban Melbourne. The site, less than 1.5 kms from the CBD, was formerly a testing site for bomber aircraft in WW2, then a quarry, then a construction zone for the bridge, and now one of the best examples of revegetation in inner Melbourne.We’ve been planting the area as a mixture of salt marsh vegetation, transitioning into open coastal forest – with dominant species of Eucalyptus, salt bush, Duma and Samphire.Thank you to CGI and Fifteen Trees for your support of our planting projects this year. Let’s hope we can all plant together in 2021.Nic Brinkley | Manager | Westgate Biodiversity
Writer – Sarah Hart.
Sarah is an artist whose passions include the stories and experiences of women and narrative driven creative work. Her aim is to delight, to reveal glimpses of everyday beauty, and to celebrate flights of the ordinary. Sarah works across a range of media, with an abiding interest in pen and ink, mixed media and the human form. You can find Sarah here.
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Restoring Australian ecosystems. Supporting communities with their revegetation projects for a greener and healthier planet.
Fifteen Trees acknowledges Indigenous Australians as the traditional custodians of the lands on which we work, live and play.
We recognise that Indigenous Australians have cared for and lived in harmony with this land for millennia, and their knowledge and wisdom of the land endures.
We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and stand in solidarity as Indigenous Australians seek a fairer and more sustainable future for the land and its people.