We’ll provide you with the best available information, mapping and data about flooding, coastal hazards and bushfires through VicPlan, our statewide digital map.
To ensure development decisions account for new information about flood risk, we’ll include new modelling data in planning schemes through a streamlined planning scheme amendment process.
We’ll also prepare new guidelines to guide the design of flood-resilient buildings.
The parliamentary inquiry into the 2022 Victorian floods found we need to identify flooding risks and communicate them to the community. Good flood management needs good flood modelling, but planning schemes aren’t keeping up with the latest flood models.
Some locations simply aren’t suitable for more homes. The increasing impacts of climate change and risks associated with rising sea levels, intense rainfall and flooding, droughts, heatwaves and bushfires mean it’s not safe or appropriate to build homes in some areas. We need to clearly identify which areas so these impacts and risks can be considered in decision-making. We also need better guidance about the design of buildings in areas with a flood risk but where there can be some development.
As we update modelling for Melbourne and regional Victoria, some areas we now see as no or low risk of flooding will be identified as being at flood prone, which means that the risk will be greater than a one per cent chance of flooding each year, standard we use to decide if land is flood prone.
It’s not just regional towns that are at risk – some of Melbourne’s major urban renewal areas, including Fishermans Bend and Arden, are at risk of flooding. In these locations, buildings must be resilient to flooding.
Page last updated: 28/02/25
