Suchergebnisse

The increasing complexity of societal change in response to the new global economy requires an enhanced capacity for scientific assessment and monitoring, particularly of critical infrastructure such as ports and harbors. Public pressure for decision transparency in government and corporations drives the need for a new framework for thinking about globalization and the prioritization of social and corporate values that reaches beyond the realms of economics, world trade, and corporate management to include environmental protection and social goals. Establishing, maintaining, and enhancing a se

The demand for advanced management methods and tools for marine ecosystems is increasing worldwide. Today, many marine ecosystems are significantly affected by disastrous pollution from industrial, agricultural, municipal, transportation, and other anthropogenic sources. The issues of environmental integrity are especially acute in the Mediterranean and Red Sea basins, the cradle of modern civilization. The drying of the Dead Sea is one of the most vivid examples of environmental disintegration with severe negative consequences on the ecology, industry, and wildlife in the area. Strategic management and coordination of international remedial and restoration efforts is required to improve environmental conditions of marine ecosystems in the Middle East as well as in other areas.The NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) held in Nice in October 2003 was designed to: (1) provide a discussion forum for the latest developments in the field of environmentally-conscious strategic management of marine environments, and (2) integrate expertise of ecologists, biologists, economists, and managers from European, American, Canadian, Russian, and Israeli organizations in developing a framework for strategic management of marine ecosystems. Papers in this book were submitted by the ASI lecturers and participants. In addition, several papers were invited from the leading scientists in the field.

As a result of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986, large forested areas in Europe were contaminated by radionuclides. Extensive societal pressure has been exerted to decrease the radiation dose to the population and to the environment. Thus, in making abatement and remediation policy decisions not only economic costs, but also human and environmental risk assessment are desired. Forest remediation by organic layer removal, one of the most promising cleanup policies, is considered in this paper. Ecological risk assessment requires evaluation of the radionuclide distribution in forests. The FORESTPATH model(1,2) is used for predicting the radionuclide fate in forest compartments after deposition as well as for evaluating the application of the remedial policy. Time of intervention and radionuclide deposition profile was predicted as being crucial for the remediation efficiency. Risk assessment conducted for a critical group of forest users in Belarus shows that consumption of forest products (berries and mushrooms) leads to about 0.004% risk of a fatal cancer. Cost‐benefit analysis for forest cleanup suggests that complete removal of organic layer is too expensive for application in Belarus.

This book aims to provide a collection of early ideas regarding the results of applying risk and resilience tools and strategies to COVID-19. Each chapter provides a distinct contribution to the new and rapidly growing literature on the developing COVID-19 pandemic from the vantage points of fields ranging from civil and environmental engineering to public policy, from urban planning to economics, and from public health to systems theory. Contributing chapters to the book are both scholars and active practitioners, who are bridging their applied work with critical scholarly interpretation and reflection. The book's primary purpose is to empower stakeholders and decision-makers with the most recent research in order that they can better understand the systemic and sweeping nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as which strategies could be implemented to maximize socioeconomic and public health recovery and adaptation over the long-term.

AbstractSynthetic biology (SB) involves the alteration of living cells and biomolecules for specific purposes. Products developed using these approaches could have significant societal benefits, but also pose uncertain risks to human and environmental health. Policymakers currently face decisions regarding how stringently to regulate and monitor various SB applications. This is a complex task, in which policymakers must balance uncertain economic, political, social, and health‐related decision factors associated with SB use. We argue that formal decision analytical tools could serve as a method to integrate available evidence‐based information and expert judgment on the impacts associated with SB innovations, synthesize that information into quantitative indicators, and serve as the first step toward guiding governance of these emerging technologies. For this paper, we apply multi‐criteria decision analysis to a specific case of SB, a micro‐robot based on biological cells called "cyberplasm." We use data from a Delphi study to assess cyberplasm governance options and demonstrate how such decision tools may be used for assessments of SB oversight.

Emerging "prevention‐based" approaches to chemical regulation seek to minimize the use of toxic chemicals by mandating or directly incentivizing the adoption of viable safer alternative chemicals or processes. California and Maine are beginning to implement such programs, requiring manufacturers of consumer products containing certain chemicals of concern to identify and evaluate potential safer alternatives. In the European Union, the REACH program imposes similar obligations on manufacturers of certain substances of very high concern. Effective prevention‐based regulation requires regulatory alternatives analysis (RAA), a methodology for comparing and evaluating the regulated chemical or process and its alternatives across a range of relevant criteria. RAA has both public and private dimensions. To a significant degree, alternatives analysis is an aspect of product design; that is, the process by which private industry designs the goods it sells. Accordingly, an RAA method should reflect the attributes of well‐crafted product design tools used by businesses. But RAA adds health and environmental objectives to the mix of concerns taken into account by the product designer. Moreover, as part of a prevention‐based regulatory regime, it implicates important public values such as legitimacy, equity, public engagement, and accountability. Thus, an RAA should reflect both private standards and public values, and be evaluated against them. This article adopts that perspective, identifying an integrated set of design principles for RAA, and illustrating the application of those principles.

AbstractCapability gaps prioritization is an important task required in multiple research and acquisition programs in military and industrial settings. We used multi‐criteria decision analysis to prioritize capability gaps for small arms identified in a small‐arms‐specific Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Capabilities Integration & Development System study as approved by the DOD Joint Service Small Arms Program in 2005. A criteria hierarchy was created for use in judging the importance of each gap, taking into account time frames, tasks, conditions, and standards established by military subject matter experts. Military respondents representing US Army, Marine, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and SOCOM then completed an online preference survey using pairwise comparisons of each criterion, and analytical hierarchy process was used to produce a gap prioritization for each respondent and service, as well as one overall ranking. The priority rankings have helped in informing program and funding allocation decisions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractWith coordinated military and civil operations in developing countries, the integration of local stakeholder values with the goals of security and nation building is crucial. Such integration encourages innovative and effective courses of action and prioritization of resources. Although tools of multi‐criteria decision analysis are well suited for resource prioritization, designing practical stakeholder value judgment elicitation in developing countries is a challenge because of cultural, organizational, and other barriers. Specifically, the weight of individual decision criteria can increase or decrease when diverse scenarios of emergent conditions are introduced or advocated by various stakeholders. This article develops methodology to identify the most important emergent conditions for infrastructure planning among a set of scenarios involving military and civil stakeholders. Across the infrastructure development alternatives, we identify scenarios that represent opportunities and those that represent threats. We adapt the framework of the swing weighting method for recalibration of a baseline value function with a variety of assumptions of scenarios, where each scenario is composed of one or more emergent conditions. The approach reduces the typical demand on stakeholders for elicitation of preference weights, as the entire value function is not entirely reconstructed per scenario. The approach and methodology were tested in a strategy workshop with more than 50 international participants and presented to ministry officials in a developing country. The testing integrated political, economic, environmental, and technology emergent conditions for prioritizing among infrastructure projects. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Whether and to what extent contaminated sites harm ecologic and human health are topics of considerable interest, but also considerable uncertainty. Several federal and state agencies have approved the use of some or many aspects of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), but its site‐specific application has often been limited to high‐profile sites and large projects. Nonetheless, times are changing: newly developed software tools, and recent federal and state guidance documents formalizing PRA procedures, now make PRA a readily available method of analysis for even small‐scale projects. This article presents and discusses a broad review of PRA literature published since 2000.3

AbstractThe Dallas‐Fort Worth International Airport is used as an example of how traditional approaches of hardening isolated components of critical infrastructure against specific threats leaves critical assets exposed to significant, expensive, and unacceptable levels of cascading failure. Optimizing the entire airport supply chain requires the development of an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates the complexities of the airports' supply chain including numerous dependent, interdependent and independent relationships. Far greater return‐on‐investment will be yielded through resilience‐focused approaches that address the entire life cycle of disruptions including planning, absorption, recovery and adaptation.