The need for a holistic approach to address future emerging risks

Abstract

In the future, the world and civilised society with its complex infrastructure shall be exposed to more severe and potentially risky hazard and shock scenarios. Climate change will amplify severe hazards into extreme conditions never before experienced. Climate change is an emerging reality in a much more complex and interwoven set of considerations encompassing economic development, population growth and the need for political awareness and real action to be taken. We are also becoming more vulnerable to malicious shock attacks caused by criminal, anti-political and terrorist activities, including situations that involve physical damage, but also “soft-transmitted” cyber-attack aimed at our densely coupled communication and data networks. As scientists, engineers and managers in the carbon-free nuclear industry, it is judged that we need more holistic approaches to risk and hazard assessment that are able to substantiate that the infrastructure is not only robust and resilient enough to withstand the impact, but also to test the capability and effectiveness of the overall ‘wider-field’ coping strategies; including not only the plant itself, but also the site, the adjacent region and the resident country-wide infrastructure and resource capability. Resilience essentially depends the ease and success for passing through the “coping cycle”.