Crisis and Emergency Situation Management

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a forward-looking summary to critical space, undersea, and underground systems. Proposed areas of research at the methodological, epistemology, ontological, and nature of man are then presented.

Final Remarks

Space systems are emerging as important tools for crisis and emergency situation management with regards to critical infrastructure disruption . In a wider sense, they are becoming a foundational element of critical applications for resilience governance , such as information gathering and command, control and coordination . This is due to a unique combination of capabilities and advantages, as well as their complementarity to the classical toolkit for crisis management. Using an illustrative, generic model for viewing the requirements of crisis management in a wider sense, the authors contend that space systems provide significant services in all phases and processes of response to a crisis , thereby supporting security experts and decision makers in long-term efforts to also increase the resilience and robustness of societies. The benefits to quality of life and business continuity are self-evident.

The resulting paradigm suggests an optimal state for fully utilizing space systems at their current and predicted levels of capability but is not representative of factual reality. In reality, even the most advanced nations utilize a patchwork toolset that may lean heavily towards the use of some systems in some phases and processes, while ignoring others. Further developments of a technological, economic or organizational nature in this field may increase access to space applications. With the advent of regional and global infrastructure systems, as identified not just in the scientific literature, but in the reality of actual governance efforts, such as the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection, the promotion of new instruments for managing risks and minimizing disruptions gains new urgency. The interdependencies that cross-national borders and the jurisdiction of the competent national authorities ensure that security for the whole is skewed by the lowest common dominator, regardless of the security outcomes for individually managed components in the system-of-systems . It is in the interest of the most advanced and space-realized actors to promote adoption by other countries of these new capabilities.

At the same time, there is a growing realization that space systems, themselves, are becoming critical infrastructures. Since criticality is also heavily context dependent, this means that a reliance on space systems for crisis and emergency situation management will automatically designate these as ‘critical space infrastructures ’, imparting a new risk of disruption that must be taken into account. As shown by individual examples, the materialization of these new risks is not without precedent, meaning that security decision makers must plan for maximizing the reliability of access to space services and of substitutive capacity. International cooperation plays an increasing role in ensuring the provisioning of critical space services for national authorities in an emergency situation. Ultimately, this new critical dependence has materialized from the obvious benefits of utilizing space systems. This means that the security trade-off of using space systems in resilience governance , in a wider sense, and emergency management, in a narrower sense, to deal with other risks, vulnerabilities and threats, while engendering new ones, is a positive sum game or can be developed as such.