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About risk management

Assessing and managing risk is critical to protecting heritage.​

Risk management is a process of identifying, assessing, and managing risks. Risks are things that will have a negative impact on us, our homes, or – for the purposes of this page – our heritage assets. ​

Risk management helps you prepare for disaster. While we hope that no one ever faces a disaster, the reality is that most of us will at some point during our lives. Identifying risks will help you if this happens.​

All day, every day, everyone is identifying and assessing hazards and risks in all aspects of their life (and often subconsciously). ​

Even if you think you don’t know anything about risk management, you do! You’ve been practicing it for a long time. Checking for cars before crossing the road is risk management. Before you cross the road, you recognise that there is a danger (identify the hazard). You check for cars (identify the exposure) by looking and listening (collecting the data). If there is oncoming traffic, you could get hurt if you step off the curb (identify the vulnerability). You wait until cars have stopped or gone past to cross the road (treat or manage the risk). ​

This page will help you formalise what you already know about risks and disasters and put it into the context of your heritage property. Family, staff or volunteers, should be brought into your risk management conversation. ​

We have developed a simple step-by-step process and toolkit for identifying and managing your disaster risk.

Talking about risk

Disasters impact the things we care about - our communities, our homes, our businesses, our environment, and our heritage assets. We can better reduce these impacts by understanding where and how disasters occur, their impact, and measure how effective our actions are, or are likely to be, in reducing these impacts. ​

It is important to normalise risk management as a key part of managing heritage assets, including familiarising ourselves and others with the standard terminology and processes involved.  ​

In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening and risk management is the process of addressing, dealing with or controlling these things. Don’t let the lingo and jargon put you off! Having regular conversations about risk will ultimately pay off in the long run and increase the chance of protecting, preserving and minimising impacts on your heritage asset in the event of a disaster.​

If you are a private owner or a community group and you manage a heritage site, property or object then you need to assess and manage risk.

Complete a risk assessment

We recommend that you develop an action plan based off your risk assessment by doing the following:

​Risk identification is the process of identification of sources of risks, events, their causes, and potential consequences. It can involve using historical data, modelling and predictions, theoretical analysis, informed and expert opinions, and stakeholders’ and heritage asset managers’ needs.​

Risk identification is best carried out collaboratively by multiple people where possible, as this allows consideration of different perspectives and experiences and significantly contributes to a holistic understanding and comprehensive documentation of all risks. ​

Identify threats ​

Some examples may include:

Fire​

  • ingress points​
  • most susceptible materials​
  • open properties​
  • diagrams​

Flood​

  • inadequate or poorly maintained drains​
  • pathways that slope toward the structure rather than away​
  • poorly constructed levees​
  • location of and accessibility to vital infrastructure (pumps, electrics, etc.)​

Storm​

  • pathways that slope toward the structure rather than away ​
  • issues with gutters​
  • close proximity to trees and other light structures​.

Once the threats are identified, an assessment of the risk is needed. Knowing both the impacts of a risk (the consequences) and how much of a threat they actually are (the likelihood) helps us to prioritise our mitigation actions.

It is necessary to think about both the expected impact of the threat and the chance of it happening. This helps you assess how big a risk those threats are. For example, an asteroid landing within 20km of your house would probably have a catastrophic impact – but is it something you really need to worry about? What is the likelihood of that happening? A bushfire is something that may also have a catastrophic impact, but it is possibly more likely to occur. It is something that you may be worried about right now. Knowing both the impacts of a risk (the consequences) and how much of a threat they actually are helps us to prioritise our mitigation actions, risks that we can put our limited resources towards.

Once the risks have been identified and assessed, an Action Plan is needed. The Action Plan should note actions in response to the risk including costs and timeframes. Your highest risks should factor into your prioritisation. For example, if you live in a bushfire prone area and it’s coming up to summer, you may want to focus on treating bushfire risks, rather than those related to a flood.

You can then prioritise in a way that best suits you and your resources. You might like to go for quick, easy and relatively cheap wins first, followed by the more complex activities. Or you may like to tackle more complex treatments through a staged approach; spreading tasks out over a few years will reduce your upfront costs. This approach can, however, cost more in the long run, as prices generally increase year to year (you can think of it like paying interest over the term of a loan – it may cost more in the long run, but it might be far more manageable in the short term).

The adverse impacts of a disaster cannot be fully prevented but conducting risk mitigation measures, however, may lessen or minimise the adverse impacts.

Examples may include:

  • improving heritage asset risk management policies
  • increasing awareness of measures
  • construction of a firebreak or levee. ​

There will always be some risk that can’t be fully avoided. This can result in a loss of significance to the heritage place. It could be a total loss of value (e.g. the complete destruction of a heritage building during a fire) or a tiny loss (e.g. small crinkles at the edge of a painting). Significance can also be lost when things can no longer be used (e.g. a tool that can be no longer used).

Learn more about disasters and risk management

We recommend you visit the  Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience to learn more about risk management and disasters, which make help you when using the toolkit.

Page last updated: 10/07/24