Project of Counteracting Catastrophic Developments at Nature-Man-Made Objects in Russia

Abstract

The problem-oriented project to counteract the development of catastrophes (henceforth the CDC Project) was set up as a particular response to two factors:

• Since the late 1970s, a rapidly advancing worldwide pandemic of technological accidents (catastrophes), highly costly in terms of their consequences, has been emerging (see the data in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) [1] of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR).
• There are no alternatives to the innovative evolution of Russia, with the key role played by systemic technologies [1].

At this point, the problem-oriented groundwork has been laid in Russia for many years, including operational prototypes of catastrophe protection systems. The large-scale and fundamental works completed so far within the CDC Project attest to the perception of the critical demand for it. The Project is based on a systemic approach and a new technology of the problem-oriented innovative professional instrumentarium of research on nature-man-made objects (NMMOs). To date, the design of the CDC Project has been practically completed. Moreover, the Project has passed several tiers of critical review analysis at higher authorities, with relevant positive opinions offered in every case. Under the circumstances (just before further rollout of works under the CDC Project), a decision was made to advise appropriate publication of a series of thematically related articles on academic and technological issues, this paper being the first of them.