The outline of the present thesis is as follows:
¾ In chapter 2 the aims and research objectives that emerge from the introductory chapter will be briefly stated.
¾ In chapter 3 the role of risk and vulnerability analysis in the context of societal emergency management will be discussed. A broad view of societal emergencies will also be sketched with the purpose of showing how the papers, of which the present thesis is based, relate to societal emergencies in general. Another purpose of describing societal emergencies is to show the complexities associated with them, and indirectly to indicate the challenges for risk and vulnerability analyses carried out in such a context.
¾ Due to the complexities associated with many of the systems related to societal emergencies there is a need to investigate different approaches for studying and analysing such system. In chapter 4, therefore, a number of approaches will be addressed and discussed. The three approaches described have been and continue to be influential to the research conducted by the author.
¾ In chapter 5 the central concepts of the present thesis, risk and vulnerability, will be discussed and explicitly defined. The definitions will be of operational type which is a particular concrete type of definition. The definition of risk will basically be a review of an existing definition, whereas vulnerability is an extension of the definition of risk which has been proposed by the research group of which the author is a part.
¾ In chapter 6, three research themes will be presented: vulnerability of critical infrastructure networks, emergency response capabilities and value input to risk analysis and decision-making. These themes are closely related to the
papers. After a presentation of the themes, these will be briefly evaluated and suggestions for future work will be given.
¾ In chapter 7, a number of concluding remarks will be given. In the end of this document the papers, of which this thesis is based, will be attached.
2 Aims and research objectives
From the general background provided by chapter 1, a number of aims and research objectives can be stated for the work in the present thesis. The first objective concerns operational definitions. As was said in the previous chapter, operational definitions can be very useful when developing methods, evaluating methods or conducting analyses in practice. For two concepts that are very interesting here, namely vulnerability and emergency response capabilities, no operational definitions appear to exist in the academic literature. The first research objective therefore is to develop operational definitions of vulnerability and emergency response capabilities that can be useful in work concerning method development, methods evaluation or analyses in practice.
The second and third research objectives concern methods for vulnerability analysis of large-scale technical infrastructures. To some extent methods that capture the effects of perturbations already exist; however, the effect of very large perturbations, which potentially can cause catastrophic consequences, is sometimes ignored in standard analyses of technical infrastructures. In general it is possible to separate between analyses that are concerned with global aspects of the systems, i.e.
which aim to analyse the overall vulnerability of systems to specific perturbations, and local aspects of systems, i.e. which aim to identify the parts, components, or sub-systems that are critical to the system functioning. The present thesis is concerned with both of these types of methods. The second research objective is therefore to develop methods for global vulnerability analysis of large-scale technical infrastructures that are able to take severe perturbations into account, and the third research objective is to develop methods for identifying critical components in large-scale technical infrastructures.
The fourth research objective concerns the “value-part” of risk-informed decision making. As was described in chapter 1, values are intrinsic to any risk or vulnerability analysis and decision regarding risks, since the very motivation for conducting the analyses in the first place is to investigate the likelihood and severity of different future scenarios that may harm human values. Many applications of risk analyses focuses on single dimensions of harm; however, often this approach has been assumed without deeper analysis of the underlying values. Here, the interest relates to events with a potential for causing disastrous consequences. The fourth research objective is therefore to investigate how people are willing to make trade-offs between multiple consequence attributes.
3 Risk and vulnerability analysis in the context of emergency management
Risk and vulnerability analyses already play important roles in the emergency management process in many countries. As was mentioned previously, according to the Swedish legislation, for example, it is mandatory for municipalities, county councils and authorities to conduct risk and vulnerability analyses. This chapter aims to give an overview of emergencies and the role that risk and vulnerability analyses play, or potentially can play, in an emergency management context. The chapter ends with presenting a model that aims to provide a very generic picture of emergencies in order to illustrate what factors influence the occurrence of emergencies, how emergencies evolve and the final outcome of them. Implicitly, thus, the model gives insight regarding what risk and vulnerability analyses need to take into account in order to provide an as complete picture as possible.