Access to hazard and risk information to underpin decision-making

Understanding risk is a key tenet of the National Disaster Resilience Strategy and inherent to this is the discoverability, accessibility and availability of risk information. Access to this information is critical for land use or infrastructure planning decisions. Not only if this information required prior to the decision is made, but at some future date when investment is required to mitigate any created or residual risk. The community affected by these decisions also require the risk information so they can understand the hazard and risk and make decisions accordingly. Here, we showcase a suite of risk information developed by Geoscience Australia that can support land use and infrastructure planning decisions. GA officially adopted the Creative Commons 4.0 licence in 2009, recognising the investment made by the Australian Government in its development and the value it can serve to a range of stakeholders in government, industry, academia and the public. We contrast this with the case-study of the National Flood Risk Information Project where procurement practices of flood hazard and risk data have failed in delivering on the requirement of improving the community’s understanding of flood hazard and risk. We show how these challenges can be overcome so that ultimately decisions (for example in land use and infrastructure planning) can be made to minimise risk to the Australian community.