Community-led climate adaptation: Case studies from Victorian communities

Climate change is here. Adapting to its impacts is not an optional extra – it is a social and economic imperative.

Already in Australia, disasters cost the economy a combined $38 billion a year, along with unquantifiable human and animal suffering, and ecological destruction.

Regardless of what actions are taken to address climate change, significant harms are already locked in, including risks to people’s lives, livelihoods, health and wellbeing. In the currently projected 2.6°C warming scenario, there will be more frequent and intense disasters and around four times as many heatwaves by 2050. Water and food security will be undermined, and First Peoples’ cultural connections with land devastated.

There is still a wide array of possible emissions pathways and climate futures, so climate mitigation is, rightfully, a priority for government and interested groups across our communities.

However, given what is already here and what is coming, climate adaptation must also be non-negotiable.

The focus of adaptation matters enormously. This is because, while everyone will be impacted by climate change, not everyone will be impacted equally.

The same groups who are hardest hit by climate change are those facing the greatest limitations on their capacity to adapt to it, because of systemic barriers such as:

• Location, which affects access to education and employment opportunities, and exposure to heat and disasters
• Gender, with women often taking on greater caring roles and having less capacity and resources to adapt
• Experiences of disability, which often put households in financial precarity and at greater physical risk.

Recent research by VCOSS and the University of Melbourne sheds light on the underlying inequities that affect who is hardest hit – including people experiencing poverty, First Peoples, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities. It also reveals how inequities are entrenched and exacerbated by climate change and disasters, creating a feedback loop of disadvantage.

Adaptation to climate change will not work unless it addresses the needs of the most imperiled groups. What is needed is transformative adaptation, which means dismantling those barriers to adaptation, and shifting the burden of adapting away from individuals and towards systems-level adaptation.

Victoria’s community services sector plays a vital role in creating the conditions for exactly this kind of community-led, transformative adaptation. They do this by working with people experiencing systemic disadvantage, involving community members as active partners in the projects, building capacity and enabling people to take actions that work for them in their context.

The case studies in this report explore some of the models the community sector already has in place for this vital capacity- and resilience-building work, with a view to providing guidance, inspiring broader adoption at the community and sector levels, and catalysing funding, systemic planning and upscaling at the government level.

Each project has resulted in multi-faceted outcomes for health, wellbeing, empowerment and environmental outcomes, demonstrating how transformative adaptation can simultaneously strengthen adaptive capacity and improve people’s lives. These models shed light on the transformative adaptation that can be achieved through partnerships between all levels of government and the community services sector. 

The case studies are also contextualised through an exploration of the learnings emerging from each project, as well as a brief analysis of as well as how the adaptation activities work within and further the objectives of Victorian legislation and policy priorities around climate adaptation. This context is provided for funders, and for community sector workers seeking to implement or upscale their own initiatives.

Climate adaptation must look different depending on the where, who and what: the location of adaptation initiatives, the people involved, and the climate impacts being addressed. These case studies show what this can look like in practice, where the community services sector is adequately resourced to support communities.