The Victorian Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub
Drought is an inevitable part of the Australian landscape – it has devastating effects on individuals and the social fabric of rural communities as businesses succumb to the impacts of drought. Climate change modelling suggests that these events will be more frequent in the future.
The Victorian Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub (Vic Hub) is delivering innovations to enable Victorian farmers and communities to become more drought resilient and to better respond to a changing climate. The Vic Hub is led by the University of Melbourne’s Dookie Campus, in association with five regional nodes and four university partners - including La Trobe University.
La Trobe’s Dr Tim Clune is the Vic Hub Capacity Building Theme Lead, working with Hub partners to build the capacity and capability of Victorian farmers to make informed decisions that better manage drought risk and enhance drought resilience. The work provides thought leadership on how drought should be managed in policy and practical contexts.
Central to this approach is ensuring regional farmers have timely access to relevant resources to prepare, cope and respond to what Clune calls “the creeping hazard” of drought, while also building their confidence to act on that knowledge.
As Clune says, there are a lot of unknowns with drought. “It’s described as a creeping hazard because you can literally watch its progress from region to region across the landscape. What you don’t know is when it’s going to get to you and what the consequences will be. We are building the capacity of growers to understand and integrate the concept of uncertainty in their planning – and what decisions they
should be making in those times.”
After working with growers, the Vic Hub reimagined drought management through a four-stage model (good period, uncertain period, drought period, recovery). This framework links emergency management principles (Plan, Prepare, Respond, Recover) to drought conditions. By acknowledging that seasonal uncertainty doesn’t always deliver drought, but it remains possible, the model empowers risk-based decision-making matched to individual circumstances.
Through the Vic Hub’s extension partners, farmers have accessed the resources Clune and colleagues created through workshops in Victoria to better plan for drought.
The Hub is now working to influence government policy to reflect the nuances of this four-stage approach. As Clune describes the Vic Hub: “The hub is a network. It’s a network that gets stuff done.”
Find out more: Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub
Published November, 2025