RATIONALE AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SCALE TO COMMUNICATE ENVIRONMENTAL AND OTHER COMMUNITY RISKS

摘要

Efforts to secure any community from environmental and other community risks must be able to convincingly argue that: 1. The stressors impact the community's well being. 2. The community is ultimately responsible in the mitigation of these stressors. 3. Limited resources must be committed to manage this risk to an acceptable level. Assuming any community has a fixed quantity of risk management funding, environmental security must compete for resources traditionally allocated to other well-recognized risks of war, terrorism, and natural disasters. Even if the quantity of funding is flexible, it must convincingly argue for the reallo-cation of scarce resources from the activities of consumption to investment. Economists refer to this discussion as "Guns or Butter." Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security must allocate resources to many risks. Calculated from probable events, probable outcomes, and probable life and economic losses, a risk scale developed within one DHS-funded program uses the rationale of many successful threat and risk scales. It was suggested that this scale could be used to measure and rank the risk of all international events of terror, disaster, and calamity for the allocation of risk management efforts. This paper examines a few notable and successful scales of risk, the rationale for these and the development of the Security Assurance Index, and the recently proposed Global Risk Index and its application to environmental security.