Year
2016
Abstract
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Department of Safeguards implements a strategic planning process designed to provide a comprehensive and coherent framework to address existing and expected challenges and opportunities. It covers both the long term, through a strategic plan and a research and development (R&D) plan covering a 12-year period, and the short term, through the biennial Development & Implementation Support (D&IS) Programme. The Long-Term R&D plan guides short-term D&IS programmes by specifying needed long- term capabilities. The D&IS programme aims to meet both shorter-term needs and those that are part of longer-term R&D planning. The programme is driven by Departmentally-identified strategic needs, which are assessed against basic scientific information, advances in States’ technology and research, IAEA experience associated with specific safeguards implementation, and operating conditions. As its name suggests, the programme contains two types of task, those that address ‘development’ of new techniques and technologies and those that support the ‘improvement’ or extension of existing techniques and technologies. This paper will give an overview of the Department’s planning process. It will also highlight some of the top development priorities of the Department of Safeguards for the 2016-2017 biennium and introduce three new project areas that are being established this year (Declared Information Analysis, Fukushima Dai-ichi Safeguards and JCPOA Implementation). Finally, it will describe format changes that were made to the D&IS Programme document to make it more useful to stakeholders, and describe the status of plans to update the Long-Term R&D Plan and to realign the organization of the D&IS Programme.[1]