CRC10068: Comparison of Quarantine Risk Analysis Systems

The comparison of quarantine risk analysis systems project will initially gather and collate information from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, USA, UK, Chile and Thailand. This helps develop a methodology to analyse the biosecurity risks more effectively, and provide a higher level of confidence to Australia's quarantine risk assessment system.

What is the biosecurity problem?

Currently there is no information on how efficient the Australian import risk assessment system is compared to other risk assessments conducted around the world. Biosecurity Australia needs to know more on this to put confidence in its system. The current system depends on Expert opinion and statistical theory. While this may be best available system to categorise risk, it is well known that opinion is susceptible to bias and possibly misleading prioritisation.

The main outputs of this project are to:

• evaluate the information needed to provide a comprehensive qualitative and subsequent quantitative review of quarantine risk assessment systems
• evaluate and compare qualitatively the different quarantine risk assessment systems
• evaluate how different risk analysis approaches deal with uncertainty, and
• develop standardised measures of effectiveness for these systems, including quantitative assessment.

Who will be the end-users of this research?

The project will deliver directly to Biosecurity Australia. More broadly, the techniques developed in this project may be usable by different areas of the risk analysis community, both within Australia and internationally.