Executive summary
- Beyond the Australian Government’s climate risk assessment, multiple government agencies conduct various forms of ‘risk assessment’, including for domestic security, critical infrastructure, and natural disasters. However, the Government does not effectively coordinate these various risk assessment efforts.
- At a time when global threats and hazards are increasingly interconnected – especially climate change – it is unwise to conduct siloed risk assessment efforts. This approach inevitably leads to strategic surprises, like the Global Financial Crisis, the Black Summer bushfires, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic and health burden of these shocks often lands on the most vulnerable Australians.
- Australia remains an outlier among OECD countries in not conducting such an all-hazards national risk assessment. The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Canada and New Zealand, among others, all have fully developed national risk assessment processes. In the absence of a national approach, Australia’s States and Territories have developed their own public risk registers with varying levels of quality and consistency.
- Furthermore, the Australian Government is not sufficiently transparent with Parliament and the public about the complex and increasingly catastrophic global risk environment. Risk assessments conducted by multilateral organizations, civil society groups, and other countries consistently point to a world that is becoming more insecure, unstable, disruptive, and challenging.
- The lack of upfront communication puts Australian citizens and communities at risk of grave harm. It also means that civil society, industry, and State and Territory governments cannot prepare adequately or properly invest in resilience. Without clear public discussion of systemic and global risk, Australia will be locked in a costly cycle of “respond and recover” rather than “anticipate and prepare.”
