Risk evaluation of threats to critical infrastructure

By 2050, 80% of the world's population will live in urban areas and be totally dependent on infrastructure service systems. Immediate steps need to be taken to insure that future infrastructures meet the constraints of reliability, security, and global sustainability. Infrastructures mediate between societal behaviors and environmental conditions. The sustainability of modern civilization, in balance with a sustained global environment, will necessarily rely on implementing sustainable global infrastructures; and yet we know so little of how interconnected infrastructure systems perform, or how to manage them at large scales, or how they interact with social and environmental processes. To this end, efforts are in progress in North America and Europe to develop an analytical understanding of the behaviors and vulnerabilities of interacting infrastructure systems; to create a risk-informed analysis capability for modeling the behavior of complex infrastructure; to apply emerging information technology to the problems of designing, constructing, monitoring, and operating sustainable infrastructures; and to build an understanding of the social, economic, and environmental factors that effect, and are effected by, infrastructure systems and networks. The major education objective is to develop a new generation of globally engaged scientists and engineers who will facilitate the development of sustainable global infrastructures.