Climate and Weather
Climate change will affect weather conditions in Victoria with higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns predicted, resulting in unfavourable conditions for some plants at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne (RBG Melbourne).
In 2008, the Gardens developed a Water Management Plan (WMP) to identify alternative and sustainable water sources for RBG Melbourne. The WMP also looks at future plant selection, management of living collections and planning and implementation of landscape development projects.
The impacts of climate change on Victoria will include changing weather conditions. These will include higher average annual temperatures; reduced, and more erratically distributed, annual rainfall; and a greater incidence of extreme weather events. These conditions will be unfavourable to plants native to temperate regions; for example, Northern Hemisphere trees (some species of oaks, elms, ashes, birches etc.) and rhododendrons, ferns and some lawn grasses, but will favour plants indigenous to southern Australia and exotic plants from geographical areas with comparable climates (homoclimes).
To ensure the preservation of RBG Melbourne’s unique living landscape into the future, the Gardens has developed a range of strategic responses to climate change projections. Recently the Gardens released its WMP, a document that takes an integrated approach to the functional, ecological, social and economic aspects of water use and conservation at the Royal Botanic Gardens.
The WMP informs the Gardens’ irrigation management strategies for the next decade. It identifies alternative, sustainable water sources for the Gardens’ needs. It also reinforces the existing water management strategies and affirms the importance of striving for increased water sensitivity across a broad spectrum of activity at the Gardens – from plant selection to the management of the living collections, to the planning and implementation of landscape development projects.