Environmental security, critical infrastructure and risk assessment

Population growth, needed economic growth, and social pressures for improved infrastructure coupled to the need for human health and ecological protection and environmental security make systematic and transparent environmental decision-making a complex and often difficult task. Evaluating complex technical data and developing feasible risk management options requires procedural flexibility that may not be part of existing evaluative structures. Experience has demonstrated that direct transposition of risk assessment and risk management frameworks (e.g. those developed in the United States and European Union) may not work in regions whose social, legal, historical, political and economic situations are not suitable or prepared for acceptance of these methodologies. Flexible decision-making including the use and development of acceptable or unacceptable risk levels based on the critical nature of an infrastructure type, is one potential approach to assist risk managers in their decision-making. Unfortunately, the newness of the discussions on the interrelatedness of environmental security and critical infrastructure has yet to produce a unified and comprehensive treatment of the fields. As a result, this paper will describe and define these terms in order to set the stage for discussions of human health and ecological risk assessment and risk management later in the paper. This paper reviews basic concepts defined in the field of risk assessment and extends its applicability to the areas of environmental security and critical infrastructure protection.