National and international fisheries management policies require that the exploitation of fisheries resources should be conducted in a manner consistent with the principles of ecologically sustainable development, in particular the need to consider the impact of fishing activities on non-target species and the long term sustainability of the marine environment. AFMA’s Ecological Risk Management (ERM) framework details a process for assessing and progressively addressing the impacts that fisheries’ activities have on marine ecosystems based on the ecological risk assessment for the effect of fishing (ERAEF). The ERAEF, which assesses species-by-species impacts of fishing on all species encountering a particular fishing activity, is perhaps the most comprehensive assessment method supporting ecosystem-based fisheries management currently available. This method has been applied to the majority of Commonwealth fisheries, however, these assessments only take account of risk to individual species from individual Commonwealth fisheries or sub-fisheries. It is the cumulative impact from all fisheries/sub-fisheries on each individual species that determines the species’ overall sustainability. However, the cumulative risk to a species across all Commonwealth and state-managed fisheries in which it is captured cannot currently be quantified at level 2 in ERAEF, the productivity-susceptibility assessment (PSA), nor at level 3 sustainability assessment for fishing effect (SAFE) for most fisheries. A recent study shows potentially very high levels of overlap for many species across several Commonwealth fisheries, and some state-based fishery assessments have also highlighted the importance of extending the ERAEF toolbox to include a cumulative risk assessment tool. There is an urgent need to develop methods and conduct ecological risk assessments on the cumulative impact of all species encountered by multiple fisheries.