Wyndham City understands that Climate Change poses serious risks to people, business, natural environments and Council operations in our municipality. Wyndham City is taking action both to help stop further climate change (i.e. by reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and to prepare for climate change that does occur (termed “adaptation”).
Climate Change Adaption Strategy (2016 - 2020)
The Climate Change Adaptation Strategy has been prepared, completing a 2014/15 City Plan action to develop Wyndham City’s climate change risk management response.
The Strategy responds to Wyndham’s priority climate change risks and existing gaps, and also seeks to establish a culture of organisational learning to feed into future Council work.
The Strategy has five themes, which it seeks to respond to, including:
- Managing water use and urban heat reduction
- Empowering a resilient community
- Protecting our biodiversity
- Building climate resilient infrastructure
- Establishing adaptation excellence.
Under the themes, the Strategy commits Wyndham to 16 actions, which generally fall into categories such as:
- Trialling technologies and methods to reduce the impacts of urban heat
- Engaging with the community and understanding their capacity to adapt and tailor our responses accordingly
- Building our knowledge of climate projections, impacts of climate change on Wyndham and the effectiveness of adaptation actions
- Embedding climate change considerations into various processes and policies
The action plan associated with the Strategy provides Wyndham’s focus out to 2020. In the first four years, the focus is to embed and build our knowledge of adaptation. The plan will be reviewed every four years to adjust the scale of our response as we continue to gather knowledge about the rate, direction and severity of climate change.
The end goal of the Strategy is to have climate change considerations integrated into Wyndham City’s everyday work processes. Wyndham’s risk system will manage the implementation of the Strategy.