The Development of the Australian and New Zealand Risk Management Standard and Environmental Guidelines

In November 1995 Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand published a risk management standard (AS/NZS 4360: Risk management), to complement the suite of international management standards for quality management and environmental management. The initiative for the project came from the growing recognition of the need for organisations to identify and manage all risks in a comprehensive and consistent manner. The group convened to develop the standard covered a wide range of interest and disciplines, and thus the standard was viewed as a generic document requiring further elaboration for application in specialist technical areas. Following the publication and dissemination of the generic risk management standard a number of guides to applying the standard were proposed. Managing environmental risks was seen as an important area of application, with complementarity with the environmental management systems (EMS) approach codified in the International Standards Organisation (ISO) 14000 standard series. Thus an early priority was the development of a guide to environmental risk management. This proved a complex task, and the guide was finally published in 2000. While the generic standard has been widely adopted in both Australia and New Zealand it is too early to tell whether the environmental guide has provided value to users. However there is evidence that it has engendered considerable interest.