Community health should be part of Victoria’s climate plan. Here is why.

20 July 2026

Climate change is making extreme heat, floods and bushfire smoke more common — and it hits hardest for people already facing barriers to good health. Your Community Health has made a submission to the Victorian Government’s draft climate plan for health and human services. Our message is simple: community health keeps people safe before, during and after climate events, and it needs to be funded to do it.

On a day over 40 degrees, a family who had just arrived in Australia came to our health centre. They were living in temporary housing, had no cooling, and did not know how heat can harm health. While they waited to see a nurse, we gave them a fan, heat health information in their own language, and simple advice they could use straight away. That small help made a big difference — and it kept them connected to our care.

This is what community health does every day, and it matters most for the people climate change hits hardest: older people, people on low incomes, people with disability, people with chronic illness, and refugees and people seeking asylum.

Last summer we saw what this can achieve. With a $10,000 grant from Darebin Council, we ran a Heat Health Program. A bilingual worker met people in our waiting rooms and local places, gave clear advice, connected people to energy support, and handed out cooling items. We reached 291 people — most of them older, culturally diverse, or living with a health condition. Afterwards, 89% went from low awareness to feeling confident about heat and their health, all of them found the help useful, and we gave out more than 350 cooling items like fans and spray bottles. Public ads alone don’t reach the people most at risk. Trusted local services do.

But community health is stretched thin. It receives less than 0.5% of Victoria’s $27 billion health budget, and unlike hospitals it gets little support to upgrade its buildings. Our services can’t keep communities safe if they can’t stay running themselves. That’s why our submission asks the Victorian Government to make community health a core part of its climate plan, invest in affordable care, fund local heat health education, set up a Community Climate Adaptation Fund for community-led projects, collect better data so help reaches the right people, and report clearly on progress.

“Climate adaptation presents an opportunity not only to respond to increasing climate risks, but to build a healthier, fairer and more resilient Victoria.”