ABSTRACT

Keywords: Environmental Risk Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, OGC, ORCHESTRA, Reference Model

RISK MANAGEMENT VS. EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

The increasing intensity and frequency of natural disasters, including in Europe, in the past few years have led to a heightened awareness of safety issues relating to environmental risk and emergency management at both the political and public levels. Following the terminology used by the Committee on Planning for Catastrophe of the U.S. National Research Council (2007) the term emergency is understood in this chapter to mean a sudden, unpredictable event that poses a substantial threat to life or property. Furthermore, “emergency management is the organization and management of resources and responsibilities for dealing with all aspects of emergencies” and covers the following phases: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. When analyzing requirements and concepts for effective information technology (IT) support for these phases, emergency situations in the response phase need a specific consideration, as this is the phase during which immediate

action has to be carried out possibly under high time pressure and with limited resources. In this chapter, the focus is on the other phases in which the management of emergency risks is in the spotlight, whereby the term risk, according to the glossary of CEDIM,1 denotes “the probability and the amount of harmful consequences or expected losses resulting from interactions between natural or human induced hazards and vulnerable conditions.” Furthermore, risk management is understood in this chapter as the set of preventative, integrated actions taken to deal with risk identification, analysis, and measures that are required during emergencies. It thus encompasses all of the activities related to the identification and management of hazards, the analysis of vulnerabilities as well as the assessment and analysis of risks in a spatial-temporal domain.