Simona Miraglia

Assessing and managing multiple risks in a changing world – The Roskilde recommendations

Roskilde University (Denmark) hosted a November 2015 workshop, Environmental Risk-Assessing and Managing Multiple Risks in a Changing World. This Focus article presents the consensus recommendations of 30 attendees from 9 countries regarding implementation of a common currency (ecosystem services) for holistic environmental risk assessment and management; improvements to risk assessment and management in a complex, human-modified, and changing world; appropriate development of protection goals in a 2-stage process; dealing with societal issues; risk-management information needs; conducting risk assessment of risk management; and development of adaptive and flexible regulatory systems. The authors encourage both cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to address their 10 recommendations: 1) adopt ecosystem services as a common currency for risk assessment and management; 2) consider cumulative stressors (chemical and nonchemical) and determine which dominate to best manage and restore ecosystem services; 3) fully integrate risk managers and communities of interest into the risk-assessment process; 4) fully integrate risk assessors and communities of interest into the risk-management process; 5) consider socioeconomics and increased transparency in both risk assessment and risk management; 6) recognize the ethical rights of humans and ecosystems to an adequate level of protection; 7) determine relevant reference conditions and the proper ecological context for assessments in human-modified systems; 8) assess risks and benefits to humans and the ecosystem and consider unintended consequences of management actions; 9) avoid excessive conservatism or possible underprotection resulting from sole reliance on binary, numerical benchmarks; and 10) develop adaptive risk-management and regulatory goals based on ranges of uncertainty. Environ Toxicol Chem 2017;36:7-16.

Bridging resilience and sustainability - decision analysis for design and management of infrastructure systems

Abstract The paper proposes a novel decision analysis framework and corresponding probabilistic systems representations allowing for the consistent and integral quantification of systems resilience and sustainability. This facilitates – to the knowledge of the authors, for the first time – that decisions relating to the governance of socio-ecologic-technical systems may be optimized with due consideration of their impacts at both local and short-term time scales as well as on global and long-term time scales. The resilience performance of the interlinked system is modeled through the formulation of resilience failure events which occur if one or more of the capacities of the interlinked system are exhausted. Sustainability failure is analogously introduced as the event that one or more of the Planetary Boundaries are exceeded. A principal example shows there is a trade-off between resilience, generation of benefits, consumption of materials, and emissions to the environment. Resilience provides benefits to society but at the same time imposes material consumption and emissions to the environment. Systems can, however, be designed such that resource consumption and associated environmental impacts are reduced and the resilience performance is increased simultaneously. The example further illustrates that social governance system failure may follow from inadequate design and governance of infrastructure.