Victorian Water and Climate Initiative (2017–2024)

The Victorian Water and Climate Initiative (VicWaCI) is a partnership between the Victorian Department of Environment Land, Water and Planning (DELWP), the Bureau of Meteorology, and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

The University of Melbourne was also a research partner in the first phase of VicWaCI (2017 – 2020), and Monash University provided an in-kind contribution. VicWaCI is managed by the Hydrology and Climate Science team of DELWP’s Water and Catchments Group.

VicWaCI seeks to answer questions and better understand our climate and water resource situation. Through the VicWaCI research our understanding of climate change and its impacts on Victoria’s water resources has grown substantially in recent years.

Research covered by VicWaCI includes:

• Where runoff rates across Victoria have reduced, and the reasons for the decline.
• Different weather types and their influence on rainfall.
• Rainfall and streamflow projections.

Victoria's Water in a Changing Climate

Victoria's Water in a Changing Climate provides a key source of information on the impact of climate on Victoria’s water resources that the Victorian water sector is able to use to inform future planning and policy decisions. The new findings informed the development of a set of climate change guidelines, and they provide a foundation for regional sustainable water strategies, urban water strategies, and informing water resource planning decisions.

It follows earlier documents produced as a part of the South Eastern Australian Climate Initiative in 2010 and the Victorian Climate Initiative in 2017.

The findings from the first phase of VicWaCI research that began in 2017 were brought together in Victoria’s Water in a Changing Climate, released in December 2020. If you would like to request a hardcopy please email us. This document collates and offers insights into VicWaCI’s findings for the Victorian water sector. New findings, as they are found in the document, can also be read here.

• VicWaCI maps with additional overlays — High resolution JPEG maps from Victoria’s Water in a Changing Climate with additional boundaries overlayed. See inside cover of report for citation details.
  • Urban and regional water corporation boundaries (ZIP, 16.6 MB)
  • Rural water corporation boundaries (ZIP, 4.8 MB)
  • Catchment Management Authority boundaries (ZIP, 5.1 MB)
  • Surface water basin boundaries (ZIP, 5.6 MB)

Sources of additional information

• Victoria’s Climate Science Report 2019
• The Long-Term Water Resource Assessment (PDF, 24.5 MB)
• Hydroclimate projections for Victoria at 2040 and 2065 (Potter et al. 2016)
• The Victorian Climate Projections 2019 (Clarke et al. 2019)
• The Climate Change in Australia website
• The Pilot Water Sector Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan (DELWP 2018) (PDF, 4.2 MB)
• Guidelines for Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Water Availability in Victoria (PDF, 8.3 MB) or accessible version (DOCX, 8.7 MB).

Additional VicWaCI resources

• DELWP’s Hydrology and Climate Science team hosted a series of VicWaCI webinars from May to October 2020. These virtual sessions detailed some of the research findings by our researchers that ultimately helped form the Victoria’s Water in a Changing Climate document. A full playlist is available here. A series of fact sheets are being developed, which will be found here.
• Extreme rainfall: Download fact sheet – October 2019 (PDF, 933.5 KB) or accessible version (DOCX, 20.5 KB).

Download video transcript (DOCX, 31.9 KB).

More information

• Email the Hydrology and Climate Science team: HCS.Team@delwp.vic.gov.au

VicWaCI partners