A Collaborative Effort to Sustainable Environmental Management - Vic Catchments

Victoria’s ten Catchment Management Authorities have been changemakers for catchments for over 25 years, working with Traditional Owners, community, government and stakeholders to improve the health of waterways while maintaining biodiversity across Victoria’s diverse landscapes.

Caring for catchments is a team effort: Victoria’s ten Catchment Management Authorities (CMA) achieve an enormous amount for Victoria’s waterways, catchments and communities through their solid, established partnerships, trusted networks and hard work.

This is a team who, in 2022-3, engaged with 95,000 people across Victoria - a number that would fill Melbourne Cricket Ground with passionate catchment supporters!

From cultural burns to fishway construction, CMAs lead innovative efforts for ecological preservation

At the heart of CMAs is a strong commitment to Traditional Owner engagement, access to water rights and supporting self-determination. These long-standing relationships are a treasured part of the authorities and part of everything they do.

In the state’s north, Wimmera CMA is partnering with Barengi Gadjin Land Council to enhance the cultural and environmental values of Ranch Billabong near Dimboola. In Glenelg Hopkins catchment, the CMA supports Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners in cultural burns to protect South-eastern Redtailed Black Cockatoo feeding areas.

As well as getting on with jobs at hand, CMAs are equally forward thinking, adaptable and resilient to change and well positioned to meet future challenges. In East Gippsland, where one million hectares were burnt in the Black Saturday fires, Friends of the Upper Nicholson Catchment worked with the CMA to assist in fire recovery through revegetation to improve and reconnect habitat.

In the north, following widespread flooding in 2022, the CMA partnered with local councils to launch a Community Flood Intelligence Portal to help communities better plan for floods.

CMAs are reconnecting rivers with a new fishway planned for the Macalister River in West Gippsland and one recently opened in Buchan in East Gippsland.

Catchments are for everyone to enjoy and the Merri Connection Project, a collaborative effort between Glenelg Hopkins CMA and Warrnambool City Council, enhances community access to the Merri River with an All-abilities Kayak Launch and pathways.

Healthy waterways help vulnerable platypuses, and critically endangered frogs, birds and mammals benefit from healthier catchments and community and volunteer involvement.

After ongoing decline in the last 30 years, the platypus was listed as Vulnerable in Victoria under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 in 2021. CMAs are supporting platypuses through waterway and riverbank restoration and revegetation projects. Once planting along the banks is established, it works with instream structures to reduce sediment runoff into the river. This improves water quality and provides habitat for land animals, food for water creatures and shades the water, helping control water temperature. As this vegetation matures, it will also provide a natural habitat for the waterway as it falls into the water.

This project has been undertaken across Victoria with habitat installation works occurring in Glenelg Hopkins CMA, North East CMA and East Gippsland CMA, together with monitoring works in most Victorian catchment areas.

Across the state, platypus protection works have included:

• Annual monitoring activities

• Installation of instream habitat

• Riparian vegetation works

• Installation of Platycam

Public awareness of these activities has occurred with the involvement of primary school students and community groups in revegetation and citizen science aspects of the projects, together with the world-first launch of Platycam, a livestream of platypuses in the wild.

Platypuses thrive with community involvement: habitat restoration, Platycam, and annual monitoring safeguard their future.

Vic Catchments was awarded the Banksia Foundation's 2024 Nature Positive Award.

Website: viccatchments.com.au