Risks & Opportunities for the Blue Economy

This project will deliver an integrative characterisation of risk across all parts of the CRC – engineering and technology, production, energy, sustainability and policy. The resulting integrated registry will identify the multidimensional envelopes of risk relevant to the Blue Economy activities in the short to medium term. Opportunities (research gaps, industry needs etc) identified during the analysis will also be catalogued.

Cataloguing hazards and characterising risks is the most challenging step of any risk identification process. Consequently, this project is foundational to many CRC activities, bringing immediate benefit to any industry partners undertaking trials or deployments within the next decade.

Objectives

1. Review hazard analysis methods in each domain via a high-level literature review.
2. Identify and rank potential hazards to a range of offshore aquaculture and energy production systems, and the hazards those production systems pose to the broader socio-ecological systems they sit within.
3. Run expert and industry-driven workshops for each domain to elicit risk profiles/envelopes of identified hazards.
4. An integrated hazard analysis and risk registry across the five domains including identifying connections among the areas and flagging knowledge gaps and opportunities.

A ‘Risks and Opportunities for the Blue Economy’ webinar was held featuring challenges and lessons from working across diverse sectoral expertise, methods used and applications used to elicit information, the final project results and an introduction to the online registry.

This project undertook a process to identify hazards across a very broad set of domains linked to Australia’s emerging Blue Economy and ranked them using an agreed set of criteria. The end result is an interactive registry of hazards for the emerging offshore Blue Economy in Australia.