An Application of Qualitative Risk Assessment in Park Management

The identification and prioritization of natural values and the potential threats to them is an essential part of the management of parks and reserves by Parks Victoria, which regularly explores alternative ways to undertake and improve the efficiency of this process. Here we describe an application of ecological risk assessment techniques for identifying and analysing risks to natural values in the mallee national parks of north-western Victoria. Utilizing a workshop setting and multiple assessors, hazards were identified with the aid of a hazard matrix. A modification of the risk analysis protocol from the Australian Standard for Risk Management, AS/NZS 4360, was used to facilitate assessment by multiple participants and to capture the full range of their judgements so as to best characterise threats to natural values. An iterative process provided opportunity to resolve uncertainty due to linguistic ambiguity and vagueness, and genuine differences of opinion that remained were explicitly represented in the final ranking of the hazards. A fault tree was then used to explore the ecological complexities behind one particular issue of concern in the mallee parks.