Concluding Remarks
Tarmo Soomere
The central driving force of the proposed technique is the contemporary paradigm
that the fundamental benefit in environmental aspects should be achieved by means
of reasonable investments and minimum interference to the course of things. This
paradigm has motivated the BONUS BalticWay team to address the possibilities for
avoiding beforehand potentially extensive damage rather than allocating large investments to mitigate the already occurred damages. The key idea is to quantify the
potential of different (offshore) areas to serve as a source of remote danger to the
environment in case an adverse impact is released in such an area. An estimate is
obtained by means of solving the relevant inverse problem approximately. The applications have focused on the evaluation of the potential of current-driven transport
of neutrally buoyant pollution or contaminants to the nearshore (which is tagged
with a fixed price label). The key elements are Lagrangian trajectories of persistent
pollution or contaminant particles that are passively carried by surface currents. The
final step of minimizing environmental risks makes use of the spatial variability of
the resulting quantification.
The potential of each sea point to pose a danger to vulnerable regions is quantified with the use of the probabilities of the pollution reaching the vulnerable area
and with the use of the time it takes for the pollution to arrive at such an area.
The latter is much richer in content and characterizes the response time available
after the accident before the impact reaches the vulnerable areas. The spatial distributions of the two measures are generally not identical and they both carry some
important (albeit not completely independent) information. Alternatively, local solutions offering an equidistribution of the costs (or responsibilities) between the
T. Soomere (B)
Wave Engineering Laboratory, Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology,
Akadeemia tee 21, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia
e-mail: soomere@cs.ioc.ee
T. Soomere
Estonian Academy of Sciences, Kohtu 6, 10130 Tallinn, Estonia
T. Soomere, E. Quak (eds.), Preventive Methods for Coastal Protection,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-00440-2,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
417
Tarmo Soomere
The central driving force of the proposed technique is the contemporary paradigm
that the fundamental benefit in environmental aspects should be achieved by means
of reasonable investments and minimum interference to the course of things. This
paradigm has motivated the BONUS BalticWay team to address the possibilities for
avoiding beforehand potentially extensive damage rather than allocating large investments to mitigate the already occurred damages. The key idea is to quantify the
potential of different (offshore) areas to serve as a source of remote danger to the
environment in case an adverse impact is released in such an area. An estimate is
obtained by means of solving the relevant inverse problem approximately. The applications have focused on the evaluation of the potential of current-driven transport
of neutrally buoyant pollution or contaminants to the nearshore (which is tagged
with a fixed price label). The key elements are Lagrangian trajectories of persistent
pollution or contaminant particles that are passively carried by surface currents. The
final step of minimizing environmental risks makes use of the spatial variability of
the resulting quantification.
The potential of each sea point to pose a danger to vulnerable regions is quantified with the use of the probabilities of the pollution reaching the vulnerable area
and with the use of the time it takes for the pollution to arrive at such an area.
The latter is much richer in content and characterizes the response time available
after the accident before the impact reaches the vulnerable areas. The spatial distributions of the two measures are generally not identical and they both carry some
important (albeit not completely independent) information. Alternatively, local solutions offering an equidistribution of the costs (or responsibilities) between the
T. Soomere (B)
Wave Engineering Laboratory, Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology,
Akadeemia tee 21, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia
e-mail: soomere@cs.ioc.ee
T. Soomere
Estonian Academy of Sciences, Kohtu 6, 10130 Tallinn, Estonia
T. Soomere, E. Quak (eds.), Preventive Methods for Coastal Protection,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-00440-2,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
417