with funding trailing the scale of the risk
| Key Points |
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Beneath Port Phillip Bay, kelp forests have declined by a reported 90 per cent.
Warming waters also draw tropical species south along the Victorian coast.
Victoria’s climate future has arrived in measurable form.[6]
Health data, infrastructure audits and weather records now tell a consistent story.
This investigation examines the evidence, the agencies responsible and the gaps in accountability.
Five themes follow: heat and fire, health costs, infrastructure, coasts and adaptation policy.
The Bureau of Meteorology recorded September 2026 rainfall in Victoria 59 per cent below the 1961 to 1990 average.
That made it the sixth-driest September since 1900.
Mean maximum temperatures ran 2.68°C above average, the fourth-warmest on record.[1]
Dry soils and hot days heighten drought stress, the condition in which plants lack enough water to function.
They also dry the fuel that feeds bushfires, including leaf litter, bark and grass.
That combination heightens concern about an unusually dangerous fire season.[1]
El Niño, a warming of the tropical Pacific that shifts rainfall patterns, shapes Victoria’s 2026 to 2027 outlook.
Whether those conditions deliver major bushfires and heatwave deaths remains the central test for emergency services.
Hospitals and responders carry the strain if the season delivers extremes.[1]
Health experts warn the coming summer could produce record heat-related deaths. Risks include heart attacks, worsened chronic illness, mental-health impacts, stillbirth and premature birth.
Older homes with weak thermal performance leave residents of Melbourne’s hotter suburbs especially exposed.[7]
A Monash University-led study analysed more than six million hospital admissions and emergency visits across 460 communities. Professors Yuming Guo and Shandy Li led the research, which covered hot seasons from 2014 to 2019.
Heat accounted for 4,574 hospital admissions and 10,920 emergency department visits annually.[2]
Those hospital visits cost the health system more than $30 million every year. Risks proved highest among women, in rural areas and in northern communities. The findings give planners a map of where heat harms most.[2]
Researchers estimated that human-induced climate change increased heat-related hospitalisations by 27.25 per cent. Emergency department visits rose by 16.46 per cent from the same cause. Urban areas proved more sensitive, with climate change contributing 31.28 per cent of heat-related hospitalisations.[2]
Heat therefore qualifies as a public-health emergency rather than a routine weather event. The burden concentrates in communities with less cooling, poorer housing and higher exposure. It will grow as hot days become more frequent.[7]
Infrastructure Victoria, the state’s independent adviser, produced the first statewide map of climate risk to government-owned or regulated assets. It assessed $318 billion in assets against seven extreme weather events.
More than $57 billion of that value faces damage or disruption.[3]
Exposure rises by nearly 25 per cent over the next 40 years. Bushfire risk grows from more than $23 billion to over $30 billion by 2070. Extreme heat exposure climbs from nearly $11 billion to nearly $26 billion.[3]
Flooding already threatens more than $22 billion of infrastructure, and roads carry the highest value at risk. Infrastructure Victoria urges funding for high-priority, cost-effective adaptation, including foamed bitumen stabilisation to protect roads from flooding. That technique strengthens road bases so they resist water damage.[8]
Highest-risk roads include those around Melbourne and central Victoria, plus corridors toward Wodonga and Traralgon. Rail risk concentrates around Melbourne, Geelong and northern Victoria, while energy risk centres on Mildura, the Latrobe Valley and Portland.
Health facilities in Bendigo, Swan Hill, Mildura and Melbourne’s south-east also rank among the highest-risk sites.[3]
The Victorian Marine and Coastal Council warns that the entire coastline faces escalating risk. Storm surge, a storm-driven rise in sea level, joins erosion and coastal flooding as hazards.
On current settings, damage to land and property could reach $337 billion by 2100.[4]
A Port Phillip coastal hazard assessment found flood threat rises significantly once sea levels climb beyond 0.5 metres. At 1.1 metres, about a quarter of the municipality’s land would fall within the hazard extent. Planners treat those thresholds as decision points for land use.[4]
Inverloch, Port Fairy, Queenscliff, Point Lonsdale and Apollo Bay already report major coastal change. These towns show the hazard operating as a present condition rather than a projection. Each town sits within the coastline the Council describes as facing escalating risk.[4]
Planners and infrastructure advisers argue Victoria must decide explicitly where to protect, retrofit, redesign or retreat. Retreat means the planned withdrawal of people and assets from high-risk locations.
The state has improved some settings, including statewide flood mapping responsibility and bushfire-specific building standards.[4]
Victoria’s climate has warmed by 1.4°C since pre-industrial times. Cool-season rainfall has fallen by more than 10 per cent over 30 years compared with 1961 to 1990. The state’s science report projects further warming, drier cool seasons and worsening heatwaves, drought, bushfire and sea-level hazards.[9]
Agriculture shows the strain in several sectors. Reported impacts include heat-damaged avocados, earlier grape harvests, lower grain yields, livestock heat stress and reduced egg production. Warming waters shift species distribution and erode kelp forests, the underwater canopies that shelter marine life.[6]
Victoria has spent about $2 billion reducing emissions. The 2025 to 2026 budget allocated $264 million to adaptation, about one-third tied to bushfire recovery. Extreme weather cost the Victorian economy an average of $2.7 billion a year in the decade to 2016.[3]
The Victorian Government approved the production licence for the $1 billion Golden Beach Gas Project off Gippsland. Production can begin from 2028 and storage from 2029, lifting state gas storage capacity by about 70 per cent. Environment groups frame the approval as another fossil-fuel project cleared ahead of the hot season.[5][10]
Victoria’s evidence base now spans hospital wards, asset registers and coastlines. Each dataset points to exposure that exceeds the state’s adaptation effort. The science, the costs and the highest-risk locations are all documented.
Accountability rests with the agencies and ministers who set budgets, planning rules and building standards. A $264 million adaptation allocation sits beside $57 billion of exposed infrastructure and a new gas production licence. Those choices determine who bears the cost when heat, fire and flood arrive.
Decisions on where to protect, retrofit, redesign or retreat must precede the next disaster. The coming summer will show whether Victoria’s institutions act on the evidence already in hand. Public scrutiny of budgets and approvals will determine whether adaptation keeps pace with risk.
1. Victoria in September 2026. The Bureau of Meteorology’s monthly summary of Victorian rainfall and temperature.
2. Over 15,000 Victorians attend hospitals every year because of climate-change related heat exposure, study finds. Monash University’s release on the Environmental Health study of 460 Victorian communities.
3. Infrastructure Victoria sounds warning on climate change risk. The adviser’s summary of its statewide infrastructure climate-risk assessment.
4. Fire, flood and wishful thinking: Why we’re not ready for Victoria’s climate future. The Age’s report on coastal hazards and planning readiness.
5. Securing More Gas To Back Jobs And Bring Down Costs. The Victorian Government’s release on the Golden Beach Gas Project licence.
6. What we’re missing in climate conversations. Friends of the Earth Australia’s account of agricultural and marine impacts in Victoria.
7. From heart attacks to premature birth, experts are sounding the alarm on Melbourne’s next hot summer. The Age’s report on expected heat-health impacts this summer.
8. Climate change risks billions in roads, hospitals bills. AAP’s report on Infrastructure Victoria’s findings and recommended road adaptation.
9. Victoria’s changing climate. The state’s climate science summary of observed warming and projected hazards.
10. Victoria Approves Another Fossil Fuel Project Ahead of Hot Season. A media release criticising the Golden Beach approval.
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