Townsville City Council is proposing the Bushfire Resilience Amendment to the City Plan. This is a major amendment that updates how bushfire risk is identified, mapped, and managed across the city to better protect people, property and the environment.

The proposed amendment is required to meet the State Planning Policy (SPP) 2017 – Natural Hazards, Risk and Resilience (Bushfire Prone Areas).

What’s Changing?

The Bushfire Resilience Amendment provides important changes that will ensure future development appropriately considers the risk of bushfire to people and property.

The affected sections of the Townsville City Plan are:

  • updates to Part 3 Strategic framework
  • updates to Part 5 Tables of assessment
  • new Bushfire overlay code in Part 8
  • updates to Schedule 1 Definitions and Schedule 2 Mapping
  • new Bushfire planning scheme policy in Schedule 6.

A copy of the Bushfire Resilience Amendment and summary of the key changes are provided below.

Bushfire Hazard Overlay Mapping

The current Bushfire Hazard Overlay map in the City Plan is based on the SPP Interactive Mapping System and was adopted in December 2025 under Major Amendment 2025.

As part of the Bushfire Resilience Amendment, Council has locally refined the Bushfire Hazard Overlay to reduce overestimation of risk in urban areas by re-categorising small, fragmented vegetation patches, helping avoid unnecessary regulation.

The local refinement was completed via spatial analysis, removing patches and corridors based on the following criteria:

  • patches ≤50ha intersecting regional parks
  • isolated patches ≤5ha and >100m from others
  • groups of patches within 100m with a combined area ≤5ha.

The existing and proposed Bushfire Hazard Overlay mapping can be viewed via the link below.

Risk Assessment

The intent of the Bushfire Risk Assessment is to examine and understand the potential nature of bushfire risk to people, property and the environment across the Townsville local government area now, and into the future.

The key objectives of the risk assessment are to:

  • quantify bushfire risk to inform land use policy
  • identify acceptable or tolerable risk for development
  • support strategic and statutory planning responses.

A copy of the Risk Assessment can be viewed via the link below.

Amendment Process

The Bushfire Resilience Amendment has been endorsed by Council and represents an important step in strengthening the Townsville City Plan’s approach to bushfire risk management.

Council has requested a section 18 notice from the Chief Executive of the Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning to confirm the appropriate amendment process. Once received, details of the amendment pathway will be published on this webpage.

For updates on the amendment's progress, please monitor this webpage or contact Planning and Development on 13 48 10.