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National Emergency Risk Assessment Guidelines (NERAG) Handbook

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Understanding and reducing risk, and communicating with and educating the community about risks, are key drivers for action under the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience. The nationally consistent approach to risk assessment and prioritisation embodied in the National Emergency Risk Assessment Guidelines (NERAG) support the implementation of the strategy.

NERAG provides a contextualised, emergency-related risk assessment method consistent with the Australian Standard AS/NZS ISO 31000:2018 Risk management – principles and guidelines.

In 2022, AIDR undertook a significant scoping project to determine the need and opportunities to revise NERAG to bring the guidelines into line with current thinking, to better reflect the contemporary disaster risk landscape and to identifying how contemporary emergency risk assessment guidelines can meet user needs. Read the Scoping Report here.

About the handbook

Purpose

NERAG provides a contextualised, emergency-related risk assessment method consistent with the Australian Standard AS/NZS ISO 31000:2018 Risk management – principles and guidelines. NERAG’s purpose is to support the achievement of objectives and to:

create and protect value, and to improve performance and encourage innovation
provide a whole-of-society, rigorous, customisable, scalable, common approach to emergency risk
assessments
facilitate the creation of a broad knowledge base of those hazards that have the potential to cause most harm
account for what is being done to mitigate the risks and take harm out of the system
improve the evidence base on emergency risks and associated varying levels of confidence in assessments.

NERAG may be used by a wider range of stakeholders, including:

those responsible for developing emergency related risk management policy
those accountable for ensuring risk is effectively managed in a community or organisation
educators and students in emergency related risk management
specialist risk practitioners who apply the NERAG method
those who evaluate the effectiveness of emergency related risk management practices.

The broader community involvement that is required to achieve the objectives of the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience suggests that non-government stakeholders should be involved in risk assessments led by governments and use NERAG for emergency related risk assessments.

Background

NERAG was first published in 2010 and endorsed for use by Australian governments by the Council of Australian Governments Standing Council on Police and Emergency Management (now the Ministerial Council for Police and Emergency Management (MCPEM)) in November 2012. NERAG was re-published in 2015 following a series of reviews based on the learnings from its practical implementation.

In 2018-19 the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience managed a light review of the Second edition NERAG (2015). This review of the handbook reflects the update to ISO 31000:2018, Risk management – Guidelines and newly published strategies and guidelines, including information related to default prioritisation of risks following risk evaluation.

Scope

NERAG intentionally supports people whose role encompasses all the dimensions of emergency management and the assessment of emergency events that have the potential to trigger disasters and impose significant social, environmental and economic costs on Australia.

Risks from emergency events are the focus of NERAG. These are events, actual or imminent, that endangers or threatens to endanger life, property or the environment, and requires a significant and coordinated response. NERAG provides a method to assess risks from all hazards and its outputs are intended to help prioritise risk management and mitigation activities.

NERAG is not intended to to be used as a method to assess emergency operational response risks nor to present a comparative, multi-hazard understanding of all risks to a community. Separately specific risk assessment techniques are being or have been developed for detailed analysis of individual hazards as they relate to all aspects of safety and wellbeing of communities. NERAG looks to be complementary to such processes.

Importantly, NERAG does not address systemic (disaster) risks. Systemic risks are risks that could trigger severe instability or collapse of an organisation, industry, economy or system (Australian Government Department of Home Affairs 2019).

Application

NERAG is designed for assessing emergency-related risks arising from sudden-onset hazards at various scales. It does this by using ratios of loss to quantify consequences relevant to the community of interest.

For example, applying NERAG's economic consequence criteria, a reduction of $4 billion in economic activity and/or asset value from an emergency event in Sydney would be considered:

a 'catastrophic' consequence for the City of Sydney
a 'major' consequence for the state of New South Wales.
a 'moderate' consequence for Australia.

This scalable nature of NERAG helps to ensure that the level of risk of an event can be assessed, prioritised, treated and monitored at the appropriate level.

Note: Amendments to the risk criteria need to be agreed and documented when establishing the context of the risk assessment to ensure that the resulting assessment is appropriate for the community of interest.

Structure

NERAG provides a method for undertaking emergency-related risk assessments, including their preparation, conduct and outputs. This method includes explicit risk criteria and a risk register template to facilitate consistency in risk assessment results and outputs. This method includes explicit risk criteria and a risk register template to guide consistent recording of assessment results and actions.

NERAG is structured to align broadly with relevant sections of ISO 31000:2018.