Exercise Convergence was a recent national preparedness exercise designed to test Australia’s ability to manage extreme to catastrophic, overlapping crises through coordinated action across governments, emergency services, industry, charities, and critical infrastructure partners.
The exercise examined how concurrent disruptions such as severe weather, fire, flooding, fuel shortages, health impacts, power outages, supply chain failures, and misinformation could combine to create cascading national consequences beyond the capacity of any single agency to manage alone.
Its core purpose was to identify strengths, gaps, and improvement priorities in national coordination, communication, and whole-of-system crisis management before a real-world catastrophic event occurs. Overall, Exercise Convergence reinforced the need for integrated planning, shared situational awareness, and cross-sector collaboration to strengthen Australia’s readiness for complex, compounding emergencies.[1][2][3]
What these scenarios might mean to you and for your business is a reasonable question to consider.
Have you had a chance to consider your potential exposures – your likely vulnerabilities?
Sources
[1] [PDF] Probabilistic Contributing Area Analysis | GMDSI https://gmdsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Probabilistic_capture_-zone_-analysis.pdf
[2] Exercise Convergence 2025 in action https://www.nema.gov.au/about-us/media-centre/collaborative-crisis-management-exercise-convergence-2025-action
[3] [PDF] MECH4620 – Computational Fluid Dynamics Term 1, 2022 – UNSW https://www.unsw.edu.au/content/dam/pdfs/engineering/mechanical-manufacturing/course-outlines/2022/term-1/MECH4620_2022_T1_v0.pdf
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