CRC10196: Climate Change and Pest Risk Analysis

This project was developed to create a template to guide pest risk assessors through the steps to identify necessary adjustments to Pest Risk Analysis (PRA) to take account of climate change.

Research outcomes:

Pest Risk Analysis (PRA) is a formal process used by Biosecurity Australia to identify and assess the risk from pests and pathogens of concern to Australia. This project developed a template to guide pest risk assessors through the steps to identify necessary adjustments to PRA to take account of climate change. The template allows this to be done in a structured, repeatable and transparent manner. Completing the template for each PRA stage reveals whether risk has increased, decreased or remained unchanged. Accompanying this conclusion for each stage is a confidence score based on how much relevant data is available. This template is the first one developed that allows climate change to be factored into PRA.

Research implications:

Climate change is potentially going to cause significant changes to the arrival, establishment and spread of many pests and pathogens. Now that the template is available it will hopefully stimulate further work on this important problem.

The template will now ideally be applied to a range of quarantine pests and pathogens to establish how workable it is across a range of pest organisms. Results from wide application of the template may also prove useful by identifying common patterns of climate change influence. Another benefit from applying this template more widely would be to highlight where there is a particular lack of knowledge for elements of the PRA process or categories of pest.

Acknowledgements:

We would like to acknowledge the CRC Plant Biosecurity for supporting this project. Dr Ian Naumann from DAFF provided feedback on earlier versions of this document. We would also like to thank the following members of the QUADS working group for stimulating discussions and advice on how to incorporate climate change into analysis of pest risk: Karen Castro (Canadian Food Inspection Agency); Roger Magarey (North Carolina State University, USDA, APHIS) and Melanie Newfield (Ministry for Primary Industries, New Zealand).

Publications: