Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS) third edition

The Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS) 3rd edition represents New Zealand’s official framework to achieve effective co-ordinated incident management across responding agencies.

About CIMS 3rd edition

CIMS describes how New Zealand agencies and organisations coordinate, command, and control incident response of any scale, how the response can be structured, and the relationships between the respective CIMS functions and between the levels of response. Enhancements from previous editions introduced by the 3rd edition include (among others):

  • Strengthening the core foundations that CIMS is based upon, through emphasising:
    • A strong community focus,
    • Flexibility in application so that it can be used for small to large responses, and from Incident level through to National level, and
    • Unity of effort, i.e. organisations working together towards common objectives.
  • Highlighting the importance of the inclusion of iwi/Māori in response and recovery.
  • Introducing a holistic consequence assessment approach to ensure all consequences (including those not immediately evident) are considered in any response and recovery.
  • Expanding on the CIMS supporting protocols and systems by the introduction of an ‘Incident Classification’ system, expanding on the description of ‘Governance’, and introducing a ‘Strategic
  • Communications’ role.
  • More fulsome descriptions of the CIMS Functions, the inclusion of Recovery (in response), and expanding on previous appendices.

Download CIMS 3rd edition (.pdf 2.5mb)

CIMS 3rd edition - printable file format that can be provided to a commercial printer for larger-scale print runs (.pdf 3mb)

CIMS 3rd edition figures

The following diagrams are taken from CIMS 3rd edition. Click on the image for the full size version.

Download editable .vsd files of figures 15-20 (.zip 216kb)

figure 1 doctrine training incidents
figure 1: doctrine training incidents
figure 2 command control
figure 2: command control
figure 3 incident management facilities
figure 3: incident management facilities
figure 4 response levels
figure 4: response levels
figure 5 relationships at response levels
figure 5: relationships at response levels
figure 6 incident classification
figure 6: incident classification
figure 7 controllers at response levels
figure 7: controllers at response levels
figure 14 welfare cycle
figure 14: welfare cycle
figure 15 incident level response vehicle accident
figure 15: incident level response vehicle accident
figure 16 incident level response business disruption
figure 16: incident level response business disruption
figure 17 incident level reponse multi organisation
figure 17: incident level response multi organisation
figure 18 local regional level response
figure 18: local regional level response
figure 19 national level response
figure 19: national level response
figure 20 full cims hierarchy
figure 20: full CIMS hierarchy
figure 21 intelligence cycle
figure 21: intelligence cycle
figure 22 planning p
figure 22: planning p

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