Losee Consulting worked with Mackay Regional Council to develop its Environmental Sustainability Strategy 2026-2031, building on previous sustainability initiatives and setting the pathway for environmental sustainability over the coming five years.

The Mackay local government area covers 7,622 km2 in Central Queensland, with a population of 128,361. Council has 1,172 employees and $4.6 billion in assets. The region is recognised as one of the most biodiverse in the Great Barrier Reef catchment.

Our work included reviewing the existing strategy and programs and developing a proposed new strategy and action plan that would reflect Council and stakeholder priorities.

Council endorsed and published the new strategy on 22 July 2026.

Council needed to update and replace its 2017-2025 Environmental Sustainability Strategy and refocus the revised strategy on matters within its direct control, while also recognising the importance of partnerships to achieve a more sustainable, liveable and resilient region.

While important to council, environmental sustainability in Mackay juxtaposes a biodiverse natural setting with a community that is socio-economically dominated by agriculture and resource extraction industries, including coal mining and export. Nuanced consideration of core elements including climate change was essential.

Council employees juggle competing operational priorities and are themselves community members. Council’s sustainability team recognised the importance of engaging both internally and externally to guarantee the strategy’s success.

In addition, council wanted a very high standard document, in clarity and visual presentation, to energise its reception by the community, especially during public exhibition of the draft, and adoption by council staff.

Liaising frequently with council’s project leadership, we began by cataloguing and reviewing the existing sustainability strategy action plan that had reached its end of life, synthesising important content from 21 council policies and strategies, and undertaking a benchmarking exercise across select comparable councils.

Applying techniques Losee had developed working with other local governments, the benchmarking assessment yielded an indication of how Mackay Regional Council compared to similar councils as well as insights with which to seed the stakeholder workshops.

To rebalance the strategy towards council direct activities, we proposed an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) focus and introduced a commitment to annual, public reporting.

Working closely with the council team, we conducted four workshops and several individual meetings to engage directly with managers and senior staff in multiple focus areas. To complement traditional workshop methods, we added two techniques to help set and agree on priorities: a materiality assessment and an online survey.

Using Losee’s materiality assessment tool, for a list of 32 pre-identified issues, we scored against two dimensions, providing a real-time illustration live in the workshops. The horizontal dimension addressed the significance of impacts or opportunities to environment, society or the economy; and the vertical dimension evaluated importance to stakeholders (using six generic stakeholder groups).

Following the internal workshops, we engaged with the Sustainability Strategic Advisory Committee (including industry and community group representatives) and then briefed the elected Council, obtaining Councillor input. We then assisted the council team in running a wider online survey with council staff, receiving 188 responses.

These steps provided a solid foundation for our team to prepare a complete draft strategy and accompanying action plan (with actions presented in a trackable spreadsheet). Naturally, we went through an iterative process of finding the right balance between commitments made in the public strategy versus the internal action plan, reflecting Councillor and executive guidance.

To provide the high standard of publication, we partnered with Focused Marketing, who designed a beautiful PDF document for the draft strategy. Council exhibited the draft through Connecting Mackay and then Losee and Focused Marketing finalised the plan, incorporating external feedback and final determinations.