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Australia's natural capital is under growing cumulative pressure from land use change and intensive agriculture, fishery, forestry, and urban sprawl. This consequently reduces the benefits and services that it provides. This paper firstly assessed how current trends of land-use change have an impact on the natural capital loss in South Victoria, Australia during 2006-2016. Then in order to increase natural capital inherent value and to ensure that natural capital is multifunctional, a system of Blue-Green Infrastructure is designed within the current natural capital of Tarwin Lower, in Victoria. Given that natural capital area is declining in Australia, incorporating designed elements into existing natural capital to create multifunctional natural capital, enables maximising the supply and value of ecosystem services in order to meet the demands of a growing population. Here, three ecosystem services (stormwater abatement, water quality improvement, and water supply services) were compared in terms of existing natural capital or with integrated Blue-Green Infrastructure elements to create multifunctional natural capital system. The results indicate that planning Blue-Green Infrastructure will enhance multiple aspects of regional sustainability and resilience in the Tarwin catchment and will maximise the multifunctionality of the natural capital. Finally, the paper simulates the cost-benefit analysis for the implementation of Blue-Green Infrastructure to show that it is a cost-effective and sustainable solution to cope with the current demographic, economic and agricultural trends, which affect natural capital. This paper confirms that in order to provide ecosystem services for extra demands of growing inhabitants, Blue-Green Infrastructure networks require to be extended in the Victoria State of Australia to compensate natural capital and ecosystem service losses due to the regional and urban development.

In Australia, weather extremes (droughts and floods) are an accepted component of coupled human-environment systems. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth and also has the greatest annual rainfall and runoff variability. Competition for water between the environment, agriculture and domestic uses is intense and the cause of much public debate. It is not unusual for parts of Australia to transition quickly from a state of extreme water scarcity to one of severe flooding. In fact, floods cause more damage in Australia than any other natural disaster. Climate change will exacerbate the situation through increased frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events and also more intense and longer-lasting droughts. The combination of drought followed by intense rainfall increases the risk of severe flooding, with impacts on civil infrastructure (road and bridge washouts, damage to houses), and impacts on agriculture (soil erosion and destruction of crops and livestock). Structural flood mitigation activities in Australia, such as the construction of levees, was initially driven by private landholders. These measures were often not well planned or integrated at larger scales and therefore have been viewed with some suspicion. More recently, non-structural (land planning, emergency management) approaches have become the key flood mitigation measure. In contrast, The Netherlands takes a structural approach through concepts like Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI), with the aim of "giving the flood a pathway". In this context, structural interventions in the landscape provide alternative pathways for flood water, slowing the waters progress such that flood damage is mitigated. Our research focuses on the feasibility of implementing BGI in Australia, considering the costs and benefits in terms of the biophysical environment, infrastructure and socioeconomic systems, in order to increase the resilience of rural and regional comwww.witpress.com,

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Precise information on the extent of inundated land is required for flood monitoring, relief, and protective measures. In this paper, two spectral indices, Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), were used to identify inundated areas during heavy rainfall events in the Tarwin catchment, Victoria, Australia, using Landsat-8 OLI imagery. By integrating the assessed condition of levees, this research also explains the inefficiency of the flood control measures of this region of Australia. NDWI and MNDWI indices performed well, but water features were enhanced better in the NDWI-derived image, with an accuracy of 96.04% and Kappa coefficient of 0.83.