Strategic Water Management: Planning Scheme Amendment – City of Melbourne

Rain Consulting worked with the City of Melbourne to provide expert advice and project management for a new planning scheme overlay amendment. The work involved reviewing flood modelling by multiple leading consultants across all five major catchments in the municipality, facilitating technical decisions, and ensuring model results were ready for use in the official planning overlay.

This project was the first in Melbourne’s history to incorporate climate change rainfall into flood modelling for a planning overlay, making it a critical reference for future development and resilience planning. The project culminated in Luke Cunningham providing expert evidence to the Council at the Planning Panel.

Above & Beyond Strategies

The project involved collating and reviewing diverse flood models and reports, resolving technical differences between catchments, and assisting the Council and Melbourne Water in agreeing on consistent, practical flood extents for the overlay. The challenge was to deliver this within tight timeframes, across highly urbanised and complex areas, while integrating future climate risk.

Rain delivered the following solutions.

• Reviewed all TUFLOW models and associated technical reports for five complex, highly urban catchments.
• Facilitated joint technical reviews with Melbourne Water and Council, including running virtual QGIS workshops with live georeferenced commentary.
• Provided expert advice on hydrological inputs, model output filtering, and the integration of catchments into a single overlay layer.
• Helped determine robust filtering criteria for the overlay and led workshops to finalise model results for each catchment.
• Managed engagement between multiple organisations and built capacity within the Council to actively participate in the modelling and review process.
• Kept the project on schedule, coordinating inputs and ensuring technical consistency.
• Compiled a clean, handover-ready database of all modelling, results, reports, and reviews for future Council and panel use.
• Delivered advice and technical support through all stages of the amendment process.
• Applied the latest climate change rainfall scenarios to the flood overlay, ahead of planning requirements at the time.
• Expert evidence representation at Planning Panel.

Rain delivered a robust, peer-reviewed flood overlay, ready for statutory planning, which equipped the Council to play an active technical role and set a new benchmark for integrating climate change into flood overlays. The final overlay was consistent, technically defensible, and ready in time for panel presentation.

The lessons learned have enhanced the Council’s internal knowledge base and established a foundation for future overlay projects to succeed.

Amendment C384 was successfully approved by the Minister for Planning in late 2024 and is now in effect.