| Summary: | Critical Infrastructures (CIs) such as Energy, Information and Communication Technologies, Transport, etc. have become critical for society since in the last decades society’s dependency on the proper performance of CIs has increased. Recent crises such as Haitian and Japanese earthquakes (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) or Sandy hurricane (2012) have made evident this dependency. These crises have severely affected CIs and therefore, impacts on society have been aggravated. Consequently, effort on how to reduce future crises impacts with special focus on CIs and their dependencies has to be made.
The main objective of crisis management is to decrease crisis impacts. Thus, in order to reduce impacts crisis managers must identify the possible impacts that can occur, how these impacts can be assessed, the causes that generate impacts and their evolution over time. The consequences that crises lead to affect society in different ways and even if some impacts are unavoidable through a proper crisis management these impacts can at least be reduced. Moreover, impacts origins have evolved as the criticality of CIs has increased. As a result of the increased dependency on CIs, a failure in any CI entails important disturbances for society. Moreover, CIs are dependent among each other and consequently when a CI fails it can affect other CIs through cascading effects. As a result, CIs have a relevant role in impact generation when a crisis strikes.
In light of this situation, research on how to lessen the impacts of crises must be performed. Therefore, this research aims to reduce future crises impacts. The use of the Crisis Management Toolbox which is focused on the Relevant Role of Critical Infrastructures and their Dependencies (the CriMaCID toolbox) will help crisis managers and CI managers improving future crisis management increasing their awareness about impacts and their causes. Consequently, geographic area’s and CIs’ resilience will also be improved.
In order to develop and to validate this research the collaboration of experts such as crisis managers and CI managers has been essential. Moreover, different research methods such as literature review, multiple case studies analysis, survey, simulation and interviews have been applied.
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