What is an Urban Water Strategy?
All Victorian water businesses are required to engage with their customers and local communities to develop their Urban Water Strategies (UWS). These strategies outline how we will manage demand for, and ensure sufficient supplies of, drinking water across our service region. They are the key planning tool in delivering safe and sustainable water supplies for our cities and towns.
Purpose
Urban Water Strategies identify the best mix of actions to provide water services in our towns and cities now and into the future.
To do this UWSs:
- have a long-term outlook of 50 years
- consider the whole water cycle
- support the development of resilient and liveable communities
- balance social, environmental and economic costs and benefits
- consider the consequences and uncertainty associated with population changes, climate change and variability and other risks.
North East Water reviews its Urban Water Strategy every five years and aims to support the development of resilient and liveable communities while balancing social, environmental and economic costs and benefits across the water cycle.
Engagement
Customer and stakeholder engagement is a central task of the Urban Water Strategy, with requirements and expectations set out in the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) guidelines issued to North East Water.
Over 700 individuals across 30+ stakeholder groups / organisation have been engaged through pop-up information stalls, a community survey, one-on-one and group meetings with key stakeholders, including councils and Traditional Owners and First Nations groups, two online stakeholder workshops and a public webinar through the Australian Water School.
Engagement Round 1
Our customer and community survey, town market pop-up stalls in early 2025 helped North East Water better understand the level of water security the community wants, the community’s preference for different water supply options, willingness to pay for additional water supply, and where to make trade-offs.
Engagement Round 2
The aim of the November 2025 online stakeholder workshops was for participants; representative of the broader stakeholder and customer group, to generate and analyse different options to meet water availability shortfall in priority towns. The workshops were facilitated by the One Basin Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), with water supply and demand options in priority water systems discussed and prioritised.
The outputs included a long list of participant-generated options to improve water security across the region, and preferred short-listed options for priority towns. We captured all of the questions raised by customers and key stakeholders during this engagement period and provided responses here.
Engagement Round 3
This current phase of engagement is focussed on sharing 'what we have heard' and inviting further comment via the feedback form below.
Throughout the project, we have worked with North East Water's Customer and Community Advisory Group (CCAG) to ‘sense check’ the engagement approach and findings, discuss the modelling results, and further explore preferred water security options to inform our action plan.
The ideas, knowledge, and information shared with us informed the scenarios that will be further modelled under the current refresh of the Urban Water Strategy and will help guide the actions that we will be committing to from 2027 onwards.
Next steps
Customer and community feedback will be incorporated into the draft Urban Water Strategy and Drought Preparedness Plan. The draft will be open for public review in early 2027 where you will have the opportunity to comment and provide feedback. Look out for the customer and community webinar where members of the project team will take you through the draft plan and findings.
Following this, our Board will then review and approve the final strategy before it is sent to the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) for approval.
Your feedback could directly influence how often you are likely to experience water restrictions and the plans we put in place to secure our water supply for the next 50 years.
To ensure you are up to date with all UWS engagement activities and project updates, please click follow below.
