Decision Support For Natural Disasters And Intentional Threats To Water Security (nato Science For Peace And Security Series C: Environmental Security)

The NATO Advanced Research Workshop, “Decision Support for Natural Disasters and Intentional Threats to Water Security” was the result of close collaboration between environmental, security, water resource, and health officials in the United States and Croatia. The premise of the Workshop is that multiple, disparate threats to water security exist, and that shared decision support structures provide effective means for avoiding and responding to potential or actual situations. The Workshop was co-directed by Professors Tissa Illangasekare of the Colorado School of Mines, and Dragutin Geres of Hrvatske vode. The Workshop was organized into a series of case studies, presentation of management tools, or a combination of the two. Presentations were further organized as to (1) Natural Occurrences, (2) Anthropogenic Causes, and (3) Decision Support Tools. Delegates from eleven countries assembled to explore these topics at the Hotel Dubrovnik President in Dubrovnik from April 22–25, 2007. A total of thirty delegates from NATO, Partner, Mediterranean Dialog, or other countries were in attendance. The final program included technical sessions using a presentation and dialog format, a field trip, and networking sessions. There were twenty five technical presentations supported by seventeen formal papers (many updated in late-2008 and 2009), and these form the basis for these proceedings. xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The co-directors and organizers of this Advanced Research Workshop a- nowledge the NATO Science Programme for major financial support and for providing detailed guidance on how best to organize and execute a meeting of this nature. These proceedings summarize the results of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on water security. Multiple, disparate threats to water security exist. Decision support structures that provide effective means for avoiding and responding to potential or actual situations exist or are under development. Water resources are essential to security. A sufficient quantity of water of acceptable quality is needed to provide for health, welfare, and ecosystem integrity. The extremes of too much water, as with hurricanes, tsunamis or floods, or too little, as with droughts or over-exploitation, present water security concerns. The goal of the workshop was to explore the relationship of decision support and environmental informatics as complementary tools to improve water security. Objectives included the evaluation of “lessons learned” from recent natural disasters (hurricanes, tsunami, etc.) and the delineation of how the use of state-of-science tools improves water security in relation to natural disasters and intentional threats. These proceedings include papers on (1) catastrophic events like the 2004 South Asian tsunami, hurricane Katrina, and chronic threats of floods, (2) anthropogenic threats to water security (either intentional as in a terrorist threat or unintended as in an unwanted consequence of economic or cultural activity,) and (3) decision support tools. These proceedings summarize the results of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on water security. Multiple, disparate threats to water security exist. Decision support structures that provide effective means for avoiding and responding to potential or actual situations exist or are under development. Water resources are essential to security. A sufficient quantity of water of acceptable quality is needed to provide for health, welfare, and ecosystem integrity. The extremes of too much water, as with hurricanes, tsunamis or floods, or too little, as with droughts or over-exploitation, present water security concerns. The goal of the workshop was to explore the relationship of decision support and environmental informatics as complementary tools to improve water security. Objectives included the evaluation of "(Blessons learned" from recent natural disasters (hurricanes, tsunami, etc.) and the delineation of how the use of state-of-science tools improves water security in relation to natural disasters and intentional threats. These proceedings include papers on (1) catastrophic events like the 2004 South Asian tsunami, hurricane Katrina, and chronic threats of floods, (2) anthropogenic threats to water security (either intentional as in a terrorist threat or unintended as in an unwanted consequence of economic or cultural activity,) and (3) decision support tools Summarizes the results of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on water security. This title includes papers on catastrophic events like the 2004 South Asian tsunami, hurricane Katrina, and chronic threats of floods, and anthropogenic threats to water security