Adapting together: Climate change, governance and collective wellbeing
Climate change is no longer a distant environmental problem; it is reshaping how work gets done across Australia, often in quiet, compounding ways that are easy to overlook until they become systemic. La Trobe’s Climate Change Adaptation Lab (CCAL) explores the hidden pressures to understand where the most consequential risks lie – and how to respond to them.
Professor Lauren Rickards is the Director of the Lab. Since its establishment in 2023, she and her team have worked closely with public sector organisations, conservation groups, catchment management authorities and water utilities to understand how climate change intersects with daily work practices. What they are finding challenges conventional ideas of risk. While extreme events like floods and storms remain critical, Professor Rickards argues that the cumulative impact of everyday climate stresses can be just as damaging.
Since 2025, CCAL has been partnering with Yarra Valley Water to examine how climate change is affecting the workforce that delivers essential water services across Victoria. Led by Associate Professor Magnus Moglia, the project is working with staff to map climate‑related risks. Results reinforce that workforce climate resilience is now central to service reliability, governance and public trust.
In Central Victoria, the Lab worked with local government through the Northern Victorian Emergency Management Cluster in collaborative research led by Dr Lisa de Kleyn and Ashley Fletcher, reflecting on their experiences of the 2022 floods. What stood out was the power and fragility of collaboration.
“We saw how valuable collaboration was during the crisis, and the question became how to sustain that cooperation once the immediate emergency had passed,” she says.
Similar lessons are emerging along Victorian river systems. Through a partnership with the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, the Lab brought together river communities, including Traditional Owners, to design community-based monitoring of river health. The benefits go beyond data collection.
“By working together, people develop a shared understanding of what water means, what values are at risk, and how we might adapt together,” Professor Rickards notes.
At the national level, Professor Rickards’ role as a Lead Author on Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment sharpened these insights. The Lab led analysis of “Governance Risk” - the danger of adapting too slowly, or in the wrong ways. “Climate change is urgent, but it’s also misunderstood,” she says.
“Simplistic approaches can misdirect adaptation and make risks worse, not better.”
The Lab’s work is grounded in a simple but demanding idea: adaptation must be rigorous, socially informed, and focused on how work ‘works’ in practice.
“We’re trying to orient decision‑making to the risks that really matter,” Professor Rickards says, “so that when we adapt, we genuinely build collective wellbeing.”