Published works

Natural hazard disasters are systemic, potentially resulting in catastrophic impacts capable of breaching geographic, institutional, functional and operational thresholds. Such impacts often interact with other risks, causing knock-on effects, or risk contagion.

While some locations can successfully implement strategic planning for a limited number of natural hazard risks, at regional and government scales, a multi-hazard, multi-value approach needs to be taken. This requires a significant advance in how systemic risk is understood at the institutional level by governments, industry and the community. This is quite different to conventional understandings based on the cause-and-effect nature of individual hazards. Without such advances, affected systems will remain vulnerable to unpredictable combinations of events, and unowned and shared risks are likely to be poorly defined.

The focus of the project in the past twelve months has been in:

• carrying out four workshops in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and New South Wales in August 2015,
• analysing the results, especially with regard to risk ownership,
• continuing to develop decision making frameworks, and
• enriching the project’s understanding of existing decision-making processes relating to strategic risk management.

The workshops’ purpose was to explore, through a series of structured scenario exercises, how values and risk ownership are currently understood. Feedback was also sought for the newly-developed draft Values at Risk Maps to gauge the appetite for further development.