With much discussion of integrating or embedding climate risk amongst Victorian councils of late, and many projects attempting the feat, Baw Baw Shire in South East Victoria seeks to share its experiences.

In a regional council cluster project with 4 other councils, we have worked to understand how best to make ‘adaptation’ an easy, everyday consideration for our staff. We understand that the key climate hazards for our council are: reduction in rainfall, increasing bushfire frequency and intensity, increased heat extremes, and increase intense rainfall leading to flooding. These hazards increase major indirect risks for us such as landslip. Through a series of process changes within the organisation, and supplementary training to support staff, we feel that we are making progress towards building the resilience of our organisation, the services we deliver and optimistically, our community.

Through this presentation, we explain what, how and why we changed the following processes to consider climate risk and how we taught staff to implement these changes:

• Review of policies and strategies to include climate risk where possible;
• Adopt a clear adaptation policy statement;
• Include consideration of climate risk in new project proposals;
• Include climate risk in risk checklists for staff;
• Including climate risk in business planning templates for Directorates; and
• Integrate actions into InterPlan for staff direction.