I527-290 ESRIF Final Report (WEB).indd - European Commission

adapting security to the spectrum of risk as it evolves over time 11 .
Similar analyses can, more of less, be made for the other key messages to the effect that they are robust in the sense
of being applicable to both perspectives. At a more detailed level, however, the precise interpretation of the key
messages tends to differ according to view.
At the level of what exact portfolio of security measures to invest in, the difference between the two types of view is
likely to be even more pronounced. Furthermore under the risk-oriented view different context scenario will lead to
different portfolios of measures being optimal, hence giving rise to multi-period investment planning problems.
The observations in Box 1 are indicative of the fact that even the types of analytic approaches to inform security investment
decisions diff er between the views.
The risk-oriented approach in its most extreme form has a well-developed probabilistic risk analysis methodology. This makes
many problems, e.g., various types of aggregation, quantitatively tractable, which under other approaches must be analysed
in a more judgemental fashion. This is true for both investment and operational decision-making.
The consequence-oriented approach, arguably, has time-honoured safety engineering practices like safety factors and margins,
as well as the traditional scenario-based approach to defence planning. More recently the precautionary principle has been
developed in the environmental policy area.
But in addition to being less analytically tractable these approaches run into even more real problems when facing budget
constraints that forbid investments suffi cient for dealing with all conceivable scenarios.
The shortcomings of the consequence-oriented approach are a problem since some types of security investment problems
are hard to properly appreciate within the probabilistic framework of the risk-oriented approach: situations where things like
very long time-spans, very ‘broad’ (some say ‘deep’) uncertainty, rare but dramatic events, or antagonistic behaviour need to
be considered.
As already foreshadowed above our analysis suggests the need to develop approaches intermediate to the extreme
consequence oriented approach and the extreme probabilistic risk assessment – both for professional analysis and public
debate. Therefore we propose a development based on the above-mentioned precautionary principle in the environmental
domain. However the environmental principle deals with another type of issue, viz. whether or not to undertake human
interventions. In security we are instead dealing with countering ‘interventions’ from external actors (including Nature).
Yet – in line with the consequence-oriented view – a straightforward extension of the precautionary principle could be
argued for to the eff ect that if a serious enough case can be made for a risk having the potential to cause severe or
irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, then it should be considered in security policy, e.g. in decisions on
capability development or legislation. One problem with this, as already commented, is the risk for excessive claims on
limited resources 12 .
In response to this WG5 has developed a ‘balanced precautionary principle’. This combines the systematic scenariobased
approach to defining priorities with an all-hazards approach by requiring the scenarios used in priority-setting
to represent the whole space of risks in an unbiased way (cf. the concept of ‘representativity’ in Section 5.4) – it is
not practically feasible to include literally all hazards, but all broad types of hazards should be considered. And a
decision to prioritise some extremely unlikely types of insecurity at the expense of others should be fully transparent
11 Arguably (in particular governmental) security services should be more willing to pay for fl exibility and adaptability than
most other actors, since they form a fi nal defence line and are expected to be able to handle precisely those problems that
no-one else is able to handle. While a normal company can always say that this particular demand is too marginal to cater
to, security services are not really in the position to make that choice.
12 Another problem worth mentioning, which is however a common feature of a precautionary principle and PRA
applied to antagonistic insecurity, has to do infringements on civil liberties. Without special restrictions in this
regard, both the precautionary principle and PRA are likely sometimes to suggest such infringements on bare
suspicion.
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