Start Date: 2015-09-16 End Date: 2015-09-20
Environmental pollution by harmful substances, in particular, and uncontrolled use of natural reserves have become a global problem and require substantial efforts for developing and applying efficient measures of control, mitigation and abatement. Also environmental changes and prediction of possibly resulting risks and impacts are needed for future environmental planning. Numerical models are convenient and indispensable tools for this purpose. Particularly due to public demand for improvement of environmental conditions (e. g. EU and UDA/EPA directives and recommendations) and due to the fact that the vulnerability of our complex modern society by manmade and natural hazards has dramatically grown during recent years, the need for reliable, complex and efficient models, which can be applied to such problems, is steadily growing. A specific regional, i. e. South Caucasian, problem causing increased awareness of environmental security problems is the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline.
For the proposed new workshop a peculiar, integrating approach has been chosen. It will deal with the regimes of air, soil and water as a coupled environmental system thereby also including questions of health and societal impacts. This will enhance the urgently needed exchange of ideas of specialists from different fields and foster interdisciplinary research in the field of environmental security.
Therefore the workshop will focus on a special class of models, namely those dealing with transport and chemistry in air, water and soil, and their application in integral (i. e. enviro-socio-economic) models. Their use for assessment of risks and harmful impacts originating from natural and manmade (including terrorist) perturbations of the environment and further development will be discussed. It will be demonstrated how models can be employed to analyse the impact of perturbations that happened in the past, to support control of an emergency situation and assess the risks of possible threats to man and the environment. Special emphasis will be put on theoretical and computational aspects and on methods of joint application of models designed for different natural environmental media. The models are computationally demanding and need computer networks for efficient simulation which will be treated as an important aspect of environmental, risk and emergency modelling.
The workshop was planned to be held in a country with transitional economy which appears to be rather vulnerable to environmental disasters and attacks, namely Georgia. This offered the opportunity to make scientists from less endangered areas acquainted with specific environmental security problems in such countries on the one hand, and it will be a platform for researchers from these regions to present and discuss their specific scientific approaches to environmental risk and impact assessment on the other hand.