REPORTS: Emergency Management Information Development Plan (EMIDP)

For some years the emergency management sector has seen the need to establish consistent and comparable national emergency management information to provide greater cohesion across emergency management data sources. The release of the 2002 Council of Australian Government (COAG) Report Natural Disasters in Australia: Reforming mitigation, relief and recovery arrangements, coupled with the increasing emphasis on the development of emergency management plans and policy in relation to counter terrorism, has added to this impetus for greater cohesion across and within jurisdictions. Beginning in 2004 a series of consultative workshops involving key emergency management stakeholders provided the opportunity to develop a framework to assist with the capture of information needs of the emergency management sector, to identify gaps and key priority areas for action. The end result, the Emergency Management Information Development Plan (EMIDP), a national information framework for improving the information available to support policy, planning and accountability within the Australian emergency management sector. This paper provides an overview of some key drivers that led to the development of the EMIDP and outlines the priority areas for improving the relevance, coverage, comparability and quality of emergency management information.