A. Jovanovic - Why do we overestimate resilience of our CI?

Описание: Title:
Aleksandar Jovanovic - Fooled by (past) resilience: Why do we overestimate resilience of our critical infrastructures?

Short CV:
Aleksandar Jovanovic is the director of the Steinbeis Advanced Risk Technologies group in Stuttgart, Germany providing consultancy in the areas of risk assessment and management for industry and public sector, and the CEO of European Virtual Institute for Integrated Risk Management (EU-VRi). He also acts as the EU Project Director at ZIRUS (Center for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovation Studies, University of Stuttgart.

Abstract:
Our society can be seen as a (very complex) infrastructure-of-infrastructures. The successful and reliable operation of this societal infrastructure as a whole depends and relies on successful operation of the single infrastructures, such as water supply, transportation, energy supply, IT systems. These, on the other hand, are more and more exposed to new types of risks. Some of these risks were until recently beyond the plausibly imaginable, some of them simply “suppressed” from the horizon: new types extreme weather bring the megacities like Cape Town to the brink of water supply, the whole states like that of California experience unprecedented fires with December temperatures over 30 °C, the whole continents are exposed to the migration waves involving numbers of people never experienced in the history before, the global financing system has not done any of the radical reforms so badly needed after the crisis of 2008. The blessing of ever smarter systems, shows more and more often its uglier faces: jobs and markets are changing, the society can hardly follow. Nevertheless, looking stubbornly to the past, we are still confident, actually overconfident, in the resilience of these infrastructures and the society as the whole. The talk will address the main reasons leading to this overconfidence. The first and the main, is the simple lack of readiness of the society as whole and the lack of its capability to look at the new risks openly: we do not have “ministries of emerging risks”, the process of creating new regulation for many of the most critical today’s new risks is hopelessly slower than the emerging of these risks, and their character (systemic, global, complex…) often fully surpassing the societal capacity to cope with them. The second one is the related to humans involved in the process of risk and resilience assessment and management: their inattentional blindness for missing information leads us to the false impression that “we know, understand and, to a large extent, can control the world”, while in reality, we simply don’t. The above concepts and ideas will be “plotted” on to the background of the large EU research project SmartResilience, entering now in its second half of realization: the project has developed a metrics (based on indicators) which can help in dealing with resilience of the critical infrastructures faced to the future, new and/or unknown risks.