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The management of surface waters and sediments is one of several activities at commercial and industrial shipping ports and harbors critical to maintaining environmental quality that safeguards surrounding communities and the environment. This chapter discusses a possible framework for assessing and managing risks to the aquatic environment, focusing primarily on sediments. Risk assessment provides a useful foundation for understanding the environmental benefits, residual hazards, and engineering limitations of different management strategies, as well as identifying and ranking management options. Understanding the important pathways for contaminant exposure, the human and wildlife populations potentially at risk, and the possible hazards associated with the implementation of different engineering options contributes to informed risk management decision making with regard to short- and long-term effectiveness and implementability of different sediment management strategies.

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are frequently reported in many countries around the world. Even though this phenomenon has been known for a long time1, the causes of HABs and toxicity releases are still not understood. Effective management of HABs of cyanobacteria requires an understanding of both the environmental factors associated with their formation and the effectiveness of available management alternatives for a given body of water. HABs can affect the quality of water bodies, thereby disrupting drinking water supplies, impacting recreational uses, and releasing toxins that can harm ecosystems and humans. HABs present a growing problem to water resource managers. HAB-related management decisions are complex and involve:

This chapter discusses the uncertainties associated with environmental factors linked to HAB formation and toxin release and proposes a management decision framework using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). MCDA links management strategies with decision criteria and weightings elicited from decision makers or the public, allowing visualization and quantification of the tradeoffs between many social and technical factors involved in the decision-making process.

Industrial ports and harbors face significant safety, security, and sustainability challenges. Decisions must be made to assess risk and allocate risk management resources. Decision analysis has nearly 40 years of successful application to decision challenges. We present a comprehensive decision analysis framework that captures the concepts and tools of decision analysis. We use four illustrative examples to demonstrate the potential use of decision analysis:

We show how decision analysis concepts could be applied in each case to make risk management decisions. We conclude with some illustrative results of the analysis.

The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993 requires federal agencies to establish objective, quantifiable goals describing the outcomes of agency programs. The purposes of the Act are fairly straightforward: to improve confidence, performance, accountability, feedback, decision making and management in federal agencies. However, implementation of the Act in different agencies has been complicated by several factors including a lack of expertise in strategic planning, difficulty reconciling multiple missions or divergent perspectives, a lack of structured approaches to engaging relevant stakeholder groups, and the presence of multiple confounding factors that obscure the relationship between agency efforts and outcomes. Currently, there is no reliable, structured approach to establishing GPRA metrics that can be transferred from one agency to the next. Successful case studies have largely resulted from ad hoc efforts within agencies with different degrees of expertise related to performance measurement, public or stakeholder participation, and decision support. Consequently, the requirements of the Act remain a source of concern to many federal agency managers. This paper hypothesizes that many of the challenges posed by the Act are characteristic of the types of problems that multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is appropriate for and proposes an MCDA framework for establishing a suite of GPRA metrics for gauging the effectiveness of oil spill response efforts. The key advantage of this framework is the visualization and quantification of the uncertainties involved in planning or decision-making processes and the potential to model multiple stakeholder responses. Moreover, we expect an MCDA approach to be generalizable to multiple agencies engaged in environmental protection missions and/or crisis response.

This paper reviews experience in implementing risk-based multiobjective tradeoff analysis and decision making for water resources, multimodal and maritime transportation, and related topics. The paper addresses principally situations in which the decision space of risk management is large and combinatorial, engaging the decision maker in the allocation of resources to the security, robustness, and resilience of critical infrastructures. The applications are hurricane preparedness and resilience of multimodal transportation systems; optimal disaster protection of interdependent floodplain industry sectors; redundancy, robustness, and resilience of critical water resources infrastructure; priority setting of transportation systems that are vulnerable to extreme events; use of uncertain benefit-to-cost ratios to support tradeoff analysis in resource allocation to infrastructure improvements; requirements identification for major navigation structures that are vulnerable to accidents and natural hazards; and addressing the criteria of multiple stakeholders in management of the risk of extreme events for navigation structures. We address the relevance, lessons, and implications of the above for sustaining and improving the security and environmental security of ports and related critical infrastructures.

The emergence of asymmetric threats, whether terrorist or insurgent, suggests a need to reexamine analytic methods applied to the design of risk mitigation systems. Emerging threats have shown ability to adapt strategies rapidly, suggesting that threat characterization must account for the response of the threat to defensive measures. We examine policies of targeting and random selection within checkpoint inspection systems, such as those used for seagoing containers. Specifically, we account for the effects of the transparency of targeting rules on the threat’s strategy preferences and ultimately on the requisite balance of targeted and random inspections. Static risk analysis fails in this case, because it does not take into account the effects of policy design on the threat’s strategy. We analyze inspection policy and process from the perspective of mathematical game theory. From this perspective we gain important insights into the role of targeting and are able to identify design factors that critically impact the balance between sunk cost and risk. We further extend the analysis by addressing the allocation of inspection resources over multiple checkpoints.

Transitional and development processes in Armenia and other post-Soviet states are accompanied by technological incursion, which is inevitable. In order to establish effective sustainable policies, these countries must be ready for notable technological changes. Each step in economic development and technological change must be balanced by effective environmental solutions. It is important to work out a methodical basis and common strategies for the development of secure solutions for sustainable practices and risk management. This paper presents an integrated approach to the problem of sustainable and secure development in Armenia. Under economic, social, and political systems, the concept of complex “triangle” analysis for sustainable policymaking in the region—incorporating framework, tools, and strategies—is considered. The model employs spiral dynamics. The framework of problems, tools, and outputs for sustainable development in Armenia, which must be analyzed in one system, is addressed.

The main goal of this work is to strengthen the capacity in such fields as impact of uncertainty and unpredictability caused by global change (GC) on transformation of security and sustainability for which standard modeling methods and tools are inadequate. Advanced modeling method and tool for system risk analysis has been elaborated. It is based on catastrophes bifurcation, and chaos theories. A “fractal pyramid” of parametrical bifurcation sets, characterizing transition of security from one its sublevel to another, is constructed. On the basis of this pyramid, a hierarchical risk matrix of system transformation can be determined. The following questions will be examined:

This paper presents collaborative approaches as a strategy for addressing “wicked” problems in the area of vessel traffic safety and risk assessment. Two U.S. case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of collaborative decision making. Strategies for productive collaboration are provided and special considerations related to terrorism risks are discussed.

Environmental management requires decision support tools that are able to integrate heterogeneous technical information with decision maker values and judgment. Decision Evaluation in Complex Risk Networked Systems (DECERNS) is a software system under development that has the objective of providing a methodology, computer models, and software tools to facilitate decision making in the field of sustainable land use and related areas. DECERNS will integrate risk assessment and decision analysis tools from multiple disciplines (e.g., geographical information systems tools for mapping and data analysis, ecological and human health risk models, economic analysis tools for evaluating costs, and tools for incorporating social choices) into a single, user-friendly software package. This paper provides an overview of the approach used in DECERNS followed by a brief overview of multi-criteria decision analysis methods and tools used in the project. Future plans for development and testing of the software tool will be discussed.