Can Nature Help Us Solve Risk Management Issues?

Abstract

As a member of the commission that investigated the Fukushima (Japan) nuclear disaster and studying other catastrophes over the past century, it was discovered that all were man made and preventable; all resulted from a lack of understanding of risk and/or a refusal to accept numerous warnings and risk assessments. The lessons of Fukushima show clearly that true security planning is not a quest for absolutes (100 percent reliability), but a flexible response to the inevitability of system failures. One of the best approaches to understanding and modeling IT security is to begin with a deep understanding of biological processes in Nature. Because many contemporary security problems have analogues in the natural world, effective solutions to these problems may already exist. By ignoring them we are trying to reinvent the wheel.