What is the goal of environmental management: security or sustainable development, environmental protection or reduction of environmental risks?
Andriy Demydenko, a senior researcher at the Department of Mathematical Environmental Modeling of the Institute of Problems of Mathematical Machines and Systems of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, reasons about it.
I read the paper by Academician of the National Academy of Sciences Vadym Loktiev in the “Svit” newspaper (№ 3 – 4 for 2022) about the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development, being at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where government responses to IPCC 6th report were discussed. I immediately came up with a proposal that can be considered as a contribution of Ukrainian basic science to sustainable development.
It is about taking into account our amendment to the Resume for Politicians. We noted during the discussion that it is impossible to write about the security / danger dichotomy, because otherwise our politicians may get the impression that there are only two extreme states of security and nothing in between.
In fact, our politicians have had this impression for a long time and, unlike the IPCC experts, it is very difficult to change it. The following is a history of our attempts to rethink the concept of environmental security. Our vision is represented in more detail in our papers and in the recent report on our project for the National Security Research Foundation of Ukraine. Here is its summary.
EXCERPTS ON THE HISTORY OF THE ISSUE
Thirty-five years ago, after the Chernobyl disaster, the author, like all scientists at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, tried to understand what should be done to prevent similar disasters. Hence, we participated in the development of basic Ukrainian “Chornobyl” laws and the Law on Environmental Protection.
What impressed me as a physicist in this process? From the very beginning, these laws were considered as purely social laws, the environmental protection (EP) was part of “social security” because, as the lawyers-authors of the laws explained, it was about the implementation of the indisputable “human right to a safe environment”.
Since the law either exists or not, it resulted in a two-level system for defining in Ukrainian legislation what the impact on environment and what environmental safety is:
– “Environmental safety is a state of the environment when the prevention of deterioration of the ecological situation and of the emergence of danger to human health is assured”;
– “Environmental safety is ensured by controlling deviations from the maximum allowable standards of environmental pollution…” “Environmental management uses basic standards, whose compliance ensures a high level of efficiency”.
For me, as a physicist, there were several incomprehensible and unacceptable theses in this definition: first, according to Ukrainian law, the only motivation for EP is to protect human health and life; secondly, security obviously depends not only on the threat posed by the “dangerous” environment, but also on the magnitude of the impact of this threat; and thirdly, it follows from Newton’s laws that impact is a continuous function and cannot change stepwise, and therefore safety cannot have only two senses – security and danger.
Ukrainian environmental policy makers, like Ukrainian scientists, still feel comfortable with current regulatory approaches to management, when the goal of management consists only in the adherence to predetermined norms and standards, whose choice ensures effective management, and safety is understood as lack of any risk.
The current understanding of the concept of sustainable development (SD) by Ukrainian managers and scientists also remains purely social; they think that the environmental concept of the SD is only “the right of future generations to meet their [material] needs” and not “the ability to meet their current and future social, environmental and economic needs through integrated resource management”, as sustainable development is understood all over the world. Therefore, they do not understand why they should achieve any measurable development goals, as the “right to a clean environment” is already included in the Constitution of Ukraine.
As far as the law either exists or not, environmental security, like law, is also perceived dichotomously, it either exists or not. This is due to the fact that the outdated definition of safety is only “prevention of danger”.
What is the problem with such a “safety-danger” dichotomy, which was quickly recognized by the IPCC? First, it is difficult to measure compliance with standards because it can only have two senses: yes or no. However, if you can’t measure something, you can’t control it. But any science begins with measurements. Secondly, the problem of management based on compliance with norms and standards is that this approach allows to catch violators, but does not allow for any improvements, because no economic strategies to achieve environmental security can be built. Soviet standards and regulations were set at such a level that, at least in theory, there was a “zero risk” for human health, and even concentrations slightly above the maximum acceptable level posed a potential health risk. And since no level of risk was considered acceptable, no technical or economic priorities could be set, no quantitative cost-benefit analysis was a priori impossible, and thus no effective development strategies could be proposed.
Such an understanding of environmental security as the absence of risks comes from the historical understanding of security as the absence of a threat from another state. However, in the first decades of the 21st century, in the process of understanding the causes and consequences of global climate change, humanity came to understand security not as a state, but as a process, not as a lack of risk, but as a process of reducing risks to socially acceptable levels.
But Ukrainian government officials and scientists are not worried about it, they are not faced with the tasks of development, they feel comfortable only as controllers of not exceeding the standards. Let me remind you of an example of the great damage caused by the “Chornobyl” legislation, which established the criterion for resettlement based on the state of the environment, on the density of surface radiation pollution, and not on the possible dose received. What was the detrimental effect? The most ineffective strategy was chosen to achieve the goal of reducing the dose received. As a result, huge public funds (remember – 12% of the salary fund!) were used inefficiently, because the same effect of reducing the dose could be achieved much cheaper, for example, by giving up the production and consumption of own milk in these areas. Moreover, these measures (payments to relocatees and visitors to the zones) created an incentive to receive a higher dose, instead of reducing it. The number of claimants significantly increased, causing further reduction of the effectiveness of the chosen strategy.
However, to all the remarks, government officials said that the law on the EP does not have the task of reducing the impact, there is only the task of ensuring the right to a clean environment and not exceeding the standards of the environment state.
Thus, it can be argued that the dichotomous definition of environmental security does not allow to develop a methodology for quantifying the effectiveness of environmental management. Because only quality, expert assessment is possible in the “yes-no” system.
Research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has shown that the development of methods for quantifying the effectiveness of management is possible only with the understanding of efficiency, because achieving common goals of environmental management in the cheapest way for society. That is, in order to apply this methodology of efficiency assessment, it is necessary to have clear goals of environmental policy and the ability to analyze the cost-benefit of alternative ways to achieve agreed goals.
The correctness of this understanding of efficiency was recently demonstrated by the Accounting Chamber, which audited the Water Management Program for 2012-2021 and found that it was not possible to assess the effectiveness of the program because the program goals were never established and efficiency methods were never developed or ordered.
MODERN UNDERSTANDING OF SECURITY AS RISK MANAGEMENT
Contrary to the understanding of environmental security as the absence of risks, the risk-based approach determines security primarily by identifying acceptable levels of risks in terms of the possibility of their appearance and potential (economic, environmental, social) consequences and its balancing with the expected benefits of cost-benefit analysis. This should help ensure that the level of risk reflects community values and that society’s response is proportional to the risk value.
A risk-based approach also identifies high-risk areas where political actions should be taken first. Risk must be understood in its mathematical sense – as the product of threat, exposure and vulnerability.
Risk management gives additional opportunities for environmental management: reducing each of the factors, both the probability of threat and its impact, to zero, it eliminates the risk.
The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, made a great contribution to this rethinking of security and understanding of risks.
In terms of risk, in its 5th report, the IPCC suggested that risk should be considered as the product of three factors – threat, exposure and vulnerability, which results in the efficiency of risk management.
For example, for the risk of natural and man-made disasters the IPCC identifies three risk factors:
1) as a threat that may affect the population and real estate,
2) as a vulnerability that characterizes the sensitivity of the population and real estate to destruction, and
3) as exposure – poorly planned environment (for example, construction in the flood zone), poverty, environmental degradation, that increase the factors interaction amplitude and, accordingly, risks.
What does this mean for understanding environmental safety and reducing environmental risks in Ukraine?
To overcome the limitations of the traditional regulatory approach to environmental management and basing on many years’ experience in building Realtime Online Decision Support Systems, RODOS, in order to assess the spread of radiation in the aquatic environment and select optimal solutions to respond to nuclear accidents, the Institute of Mathematical Machines and Systems of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine offered quantitative computer forecasting scenarios to model optimal sets of measures in order to reduce water risks and achieve water-related development goals.
Scenario forecasting requires probabilistic statistical analysis to quantify risks. Then another problem appears, as uncertainty is poorly perceived by politicians. Representatives of basic science who develop RODOS for politicians are well aware of this so-called gap between science and politics, which is defined as the difference in levels of confidence in a particular scientific finding, because probability and uncertainty are common aspects of analysis for scientists, while certainty is desired in the state policy and decision-making.
In the case of global climate change, analysis that reduces the gap between science policy and water management is particularly important because people will experience the effects of climate change mainly through the impact on water availability and water quality – mainly through floods, droughts and environmental degradation.
The above means that the findings of basic science on the need to understand security as risk management become common among IPCC experts, but remain unconscious by Ukrainian society, even after the Verkhovna Rada adopted the updated Environmental Strategy in 2019.
In this view, fundamental science in Ukraine faces the urgent task of advancing the main tenet of the Sendai Framework Program – the need for a deeper understanding of disaster risk in all its aspects related to impact, vulnerability and threat. This will require large-scale but not very expensive efforts. These efforts shall be made, in particular, by the basic science in the NASU.