An early adopter of climate change risk management for water and infrastructure sectors, Melbourne Water's approach to addressing climate change has evolved over many years.

Early methodologies involved the identification of all possible hazards and risks to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the potential implications of climate change for the business and its service community. Originally useful in conveying the broad reach of impacts, the large number of risks and challenge in attributing meaningful timeframes to them proved an impediment to successfully integrating climate change risk management with day-to-day operations.

To address this Melbourne Water recently reviewed its approach to climate change risk management with AECOM. Adjustments were made to reflect the latest international best practice approaches that seek to better align climate change risk assessment with asset planning and risk management. The International Standard for Asset Management ISO55000 was used as the basis for this assessment. This approach focuses on the key service obligations of the business and the critical assets required to deliver those services. The potential climate change impacts on these assets were considered and the current ‘headroom' or available capacity to absorb future changes was assessed.

The result is a clearer picture of where key climate change risks lie today and in the future which enhances prioritisation of risk management responses in the short and long term. This presentation outlines the story so far, the new service delivery-oriented approach, the outcomes of the review and lessons learned to aid other agencies developing their own risk registers.