The Victorian Government has outlined its approach to managing our rivers by:

• developing an overall approach to managing water resources through Our Water Our Future, and supporting it’s implementation
• creating the Victorian River Health Strategy  – a statewide policy framework for protecting and managing Victoria’s rivers, floodplains and estuaries.
• providing a robust framework for regional planning through Regional River Health Strategies.

These initiatives support a long-term vision for river health in Victoria that our rivers will be ecologically healthy and managed in healthy catchments, and will:

• support a mix of native plants and animals
• have stream banks with a mostly continuous, broad band of native vegetation
• have flows that rise and fall with the seasons, flooding plains, filling billabongs, providing a flush of growth and the return of essential nutrients back to the river
• have water quality that sustains the plants and animals that depend on the river, as well as the demands by people for good quality water
• have native fish and other species moving freely along the river and out to the floodplains and billabongs to feed and breed during flooding
• replenish important estuaries and lakes
• provide the essential basis for efficient, high-value sustainable agriculture and other resource-based industries
• supply clean and safe drinking water
• provide pleasurable environments for people enjoying a range of leisure pursuits
• preserve values that are fundamental to our indigenous cultures
• reserve a place for the rivers in our collective history.

How will we know when we’ve got there?

Achieving our vision for river health is not an easy task. If we identify and quantify characteristics of ecologically healthy rivers, we can measure how far we have come. Victoria uses the Index of Stream Condition (ISC) to benchmark the current and ongoing condition of our rivers.

Through this, we know that some areas of the state are closer to achieving the vision than others. See the ISC website for the most recent round of results.

In many areas, achieving the vision requires large changes in current river use patterns. Getting there calls for major community commitment and investment over at least 50 years.