Emery Roe

Managing coastal resources in the 21st century

Coastal ecosystems are increasingly dominated by humans. Consequently, the human dimensions of sustainability science have become an integral part of emerging coastal governance and management practices. But if we are to avoid the harsh lessons of land management, coastal decision makers must recognize that humans are one of the more coastally dependent species in the biosphere. Management responses must therefore confront both the temporal urgency and the very real compromises and sacrifices that will be necessary to achieve a sustainable coastal ecosystem, one that is economically feasible, socially just, and ecologically sound.

Designing Infrastructures: Dilemmas of Design and the Reliability of Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures (CIs) are ‘balky systems’ of highly diverse, networked components with such high performance variations among them that there are few modal behaviors that characterize these infrastructures as whole systems. Consequently, they are under-determined with respect to design principles and the control variables available to operators. These features raise significant reliability challenges in the management of CIs. In particular, formal design strategies increasingly applied to these infrastructures threaten to undermine the skills and cognitive capacities of control operators and middle-level ‘reliability professionals’ to manage them reliably and safely. We investigate these challenges and propose new design principles to protect and enhance high reliability management in CIs.