- Victoria's new 10-year strategy for rivers, wetlands and estuaries puts climate realism and Indigenous co-governance at the centre of waterway management.
Victorian waterways supply drinking water to over five million people, underpin more than $5 billion in annual irrigated agricultural production, and support a recreational fishing sector worth at least $2.27 billion per year. Yet the baseline from which the state's new draft management strategy departs is uncomfortable. Nearly 70% of riparian land is in poor to moderate condition. Turbidity has increased at 80% of monitored regional sites over 27 years. Only 13% of inland natural wetlands are in excellent condition, and of 101 estuaries assessed statewide, 30% are in poor or very poor condition.
Over $1 billion has been invested in waterway and catchment management since 2004, and active management has produced measurable improvements at targeted sites. Overall decline, however, continues. The Third Victorian Waterway Management Strategy, open for public comment until June 29, takes this as its starting point rather than softening it.
Accepting what cannot be saved
The strategy's most transferable contribution is an explicit three-pathway model for managing waterways under climate change, moving away from restoration as the default goal. Each waterway system is assessed against three possible futures: resilience, where the ecosystem can recover to its previous state and management supports that recovery; transition, where the system will permanently change in structure or composition and management guides it toward a new functional state; and transformation, where a tipping point has been or will be reached, the system cannot recover, and entirely new management objectives must be identified.
The strategy introduces a three-pathway model for managing waterways under climate change, moving away from restoration as the default goal
The urgency is grounded in documented local trends: average temperatures have already risen 1.4°C since pre-industrial times, cool-season rainfall has declined more than 10% over 30 years, and stream flows have fallen in step. The strategy is explicit that preserving all current waterway values is no longer feasible and that regional communities will need to negotiate difficult trade-offs about which values are sustained and which are not.
This realism has parallels elsewhere. The Netherlands' Room for the River programme, completed in 2019, similarly shifted from defending infrastructure against rivers to redesigning landscapes around river behaviour. What is notable in the Victorian approach is that the three pathways are applied not just to physical infrastructure but to ecological, cultural, social and economic values simultaneously — asking which of those, too, can realistically be held.
Waterways as living entities, and Traditional Owners as co-managers
For the first time, the strategy formally recognises waterways as living and connected entities. This reflects both contemporary systems thinking in natural resource management and the worldview of Victoria's Traditional Owners, who have managed these landscapes for countless generations. The Birrarung — the Yarra River — was already enshrined in state legislation as "one living and integrated natural entity," and the strategy extends that framing across Victorian waterway management. This is not a legal personhood reform, but it changes how agencies must perform their functions: connectivity across institutional and land-tenure boundaries, and community wellbeing alongside ecological condition, are now explicit management requirements.
More substantially, the strategy moves from participation toward co-governance for Traditional Owner groups. They are formally recognised as cultural rights holders, holders of traditional ecological knowledge, and the sole authorities on Aboriginal cultural values. Concrete provisions allow Traditional Owner groups to submit their own seasonal watering proposals directly to the Victorian Environmental Water Holder, to enter formal partnerships with waterway managers including employment in leadership roles, and to work toward leading management at specific sites. The strategy commits to investigating legislative reforms to support that transition. Critically, traditional ecological knowledge and western science are to be treated as two knowledge systems of equal standing — brought together, not ranked.
This framing echoes New Zealand's Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, which granted the Whanganui River legal personhood and appointed joint human-Māori guardians to speak for it. The Victorian approach stops short of legal personhood but pursues similar ends through governance architecture rather than statute.
