Background
After reading through the guide, you realise there are a range of catchment dynamics that, when combined with the operations’s own vulnerabilities, have the potential to lead to material water risks.
Hypothetical activities
- Consult the operation’s internal risk assessment framework and the well-established ISO 31000 risk management framework.
- Explore how catchment issues, (Tool 7), have the potential to create catchment-based risks for the operation.
- To help identify these different risks, undertake a qualitative “traffic light” scoring approach, as shown in Figure 8.
- In identifying material risks, recognise that you should consider both the significance of impact on the operation and the likelihood of its occurrence in the catchment.
- Seek to understand the operation’s ability to control or influence the risk. This allows you to filter out issues and highlight major concerns requiring a response. Your assessment has allowed you to prioritise risks, and identify the following material risks:
- water security in the catchment
- catchment and receiving water degradation from external issues
- community issues and concerns
- increasing cost of water.