National Civil Contingency Response and Crisis Management Decision Support Systems [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO CRISIS MANAGEMENT 1.1. A very broad spectrum of crises The NATO Strategic Concept identifies Crisis Management (CM) as one of the fundamental tasks in conflict prevention. Activities are carried out according to the NATO Work Plan. National crisis centers must be set up. A Homeland Security Office (HSO) has been recently set up in the USA, a Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) in the UK. Hungary also may set up a crisis management organization (CMO). Even if a crisis management center is located at national level, " crisis can no longer be associated only with national security questions. The ultimate goal of crisis management by states is the preservation of (inter)national order and peace. In a national context, the primary objective of state leadership as a rule is the protection of state structures and citizens Standard and up-to-date rules and procedures are required for both internal crises (such as flooding and extreme draughts, terrorist bomb attacks and nuclear power plant accidents) and for extemal ones (like border disputes and intemational hijacking)"' According to the Crisis Research Centre (Leiden, Netherlands), the generic concept of disaster is crisis, a common denominator for a wide variety of domains of threat like terrorism, disasters, riots, wai", ecological threats. Disaster is just a type of crisis. There are intemal and extemal (intemational) crises. The NATO likely adopted^ this viewpoint, though uses no official definition of crisis. In this study we deal both with intemal and extemal crises, nonetheless there is no woridwide commonly agreed definition of crisis, disaster, catastrophe, calamity, emergency, risk. For the purpose of this study some working definitions are provided. 1.2. The lack of standard definitions In the following two definitions are formulated: one for risk, another for crisis. Wilkinson et al.^ illustrates the historic evolution of the concept of risk. There are differences in risk definitions not only between social and technological sciences, but there are also huge differences among individual researchers. It is broadly acknowledged, that risk is a function of "hazard' (a loose synonym of 'threat').