National Joint Common Operating Picture | Emergency Management Australia
Emergency Management Australia (EMA) is the Australian Government’s focal point for crisis and disaster management. One of EMA’s critical roles is crisis management through the provision of 24/7 near-real-time situational awareness and analysis to support government and executive decision making during a crisis.
In response to the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, Emergency Management Australia is enhancing its technology capability to achieve a more connected and collaborative crisis response effort across the Commonwealth.
“This includes a near-real-time all hazards dashboard known as the Joint Common Operating Picture or “COP”, which is designed to display all active nationally significant disasters and crisis events, supporting analysis and improving the timeliness of decision making."
Sandon Morrell, Assistant Secretary National Crisis Operations Branch
The initial release of the COP is already assisting decision makers by:
- Providing near-real-time automated situational awareness of fire, flood, cyclone, severe weather, tsunami, volcanic ash and heatwave events.
- Improving timely analysis of the impacts and consequences of these events.
- Enhancing the Australian Government’s position to coordinate a national approach crisis response and recovery.
The COP was used extensively in briefings across government, to Ministers and to the Prime Minister during the NSW and QLD floods of February/March 2022.
Work is ongoing to iteratively enhance the COP with the intent to become the trusted single source of truth for all hazards awareness, impact analysis and decision support.
The future COP will:
- Be made available to all Australian Government stakeholders, state and territory Emergency Services, and industry stakeholders (e.g. critical infrastructure).
- Depict all-hazard incidents on a single display.
- Enable complex analytics and predictive analysis capabilities to better support decision making.
- Ingest diverse data sets from internal and external sources.
The COP will enable rapid Australian Government response to disasters, meaning a faster, more connected and seamless response for impacted communities.