Emerging European legislation is changing the scope of water management from the local scale to basin scale. The focus is shifting from sectoral, issue-by-issue management to the protection of aquatic ecosystems, as well as the terrestrial ecosystems and wetlands linked to them. There has also been a movement from addressing problems in isolation on land, in freshwaters, in estuaries or the coastal zone, to integrating these zones, and extending the ecosystem approach to whole shelf areas. Ecosystem protection will thus affect how many human activities are regulated and managed in coastal and port areas, but legislation is also designed to balance these ecosystem objectives with socioeconomic needs and goals. Sustainable protection of ecosystems requires an expansion of traditional ecological risk assessment methods, in order to address multiple risk drivers on multiple spatial and temporal scales. If one accepts the Belluck et al. definition of environmental security, which: involves actions that guard against environmental degradation in order to preserve or protect human, material, and natural resources at scales ranging from global to local… then the goals of this legislation can be defined as environmental security. However, the current climate of anxiety about terrorism and extreme events often results in a situation where rare but dramatic events (such as terrorist attacks and extreme storms) are not addressed in the same frameworks as the more mundane issues such as contaminant control and habitat degradation. There is a need to develop decision frameworks in which these seemingly disparate issues are addressed together in support of regional budgeting, decision making, and management. To that end, vulnerabilities must be identified and ranked, and decisions must be developed based upon a number of issues including scenario probability, preventability, causality (human-caused or natural), time scale (gradual or sudden), and potential costs and risks. Depending on these assessments, prevention strategies and response strategies (whether a scenario is unpreventable or if prevention fails) must be developed.
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