DS-Alert System: Inspection Priorities

DS-Alert System: Inspection Priorities

Description

An interactive map and table updated weekly to reflect the seasonally adjusted climatic risk posed by countries exporting host commodities for fruit flies. These products can be used to adjust inspection rates to reflect relative risk of contamination.

Background

The volume of cargo or passengers at ports of entry can overwhelm the capacity of inspection services. Indeed, it is often the case that resource allocation policies for inspections attempt to inspect only a small fraction of imported material (e.g., Australia presently targets around 7% of containers for inspection). A prudent risk management framework suggests that priority should be given to inspecting higher-risk imports. This problem is so common that the World Customs Organization (WCO) has developed the WCO Cargo Targeting System (WCO CTS). It is a risk assessment and targeting solution for cargo manifests for use by Customs administrations around the globe. It is aimed at supporting the adoption of international best practices in the area of cargo risk assessment. This impressive system has self-learning built into it, with feedback on inspection outcomes. In the FF-IPM project, we have crafted a dynamic tool to enhance this assessment by considering the climate suitability for the population growth of species of concern in each country where they are known to be present.

Results

The tool presented here is intended to be used by biosecurity risk managers who task border inspections. There are two components to the tool: An interactive map of the maximum climate suitability for each species within each country and a risk ranking table, taking into account the climate suitability for fruit fly population growth, and the volume of trade in risk commodities.

The map allows the risk manager to visualise the source country risk patterns for each fruit fly species in terms of climate suitability or composite risk scores (weekly or static annual value). Each week, the climate suitability layer assigns the maximum climate suitability modelled using CLIMEX to each country since produce will be aggregated from areas within each country.

The risk table allows the user to sort the table based on the different risk components. Using the risk table, the risk manager can readily assess which countries of origin pose the greatest risk based on climate and trade volume in risk commodities.

Pricing and Access

On-going access is available on a subscription basis. The system can be made available using an application programming interface. Please contact us here to discuss your needs.

Keywords

FF-IPM Developed, Tools, CLIMEX, Climate suitability, Freight inspection