Sustainable cybersecurity? Rethinking approaches to protecting energy infrastructure in the European High North

Abstract

Rapidly increasing digitization has positively contributed to economic and social development and helped increasing environmental protection. However, it also made socio-technical systems and ecosystems more vulnerable to cyber-threats. Critical infrastructure (CI) in the energy sector is particularly vulnerable to such threats. Remoteness, seasonal darkness, and severe climate that is becoming less predictable due to global climate change-the kind of conditions present in the Arctic European High North (EHN), for example-amplify the impacts of a potential cyber-attack. Although these exceptionally critical infrastructure conditions (ECIC), as we term them, pose inordinate and immense governance challenges, the existing national and international legal frameworks treat them in a fragmented manner. In this paper, we argue for rethinking the existing governance structures and propose an approach that connects cybersecurity and environmental governance. We outline the contours of a coherent and cohesive risk-based, pluralistic, and polycentric legal framework that we see as a critical part of the new ECIC governance regime. We draw upon the concept of sustainable development and the precautionary and polluter-pays principles of environmental law to propose three guiding principles for this framework.

A Study on the Integration of Resilience and Smart City Concepts in Urban Systems

“…Based on systems thinking, embedding technology to a system increases the interdependencies among systemic entities and possibly between different systems, leading to a vicious circle for the rise of complexity [46]. The integration of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is regarded as a vulnerability factor and a threat for the system's resilience [10,47].…”

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Conceptualising Human-centric Cyber Security in the Arctic in Light of Digitalisation and Climate Change

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The Visual Analytics Approach for Analyzing Trajectories of Critical Infrastructure Employers

“…Application of digital technologies has greatly contributed to economical and social aspects of humanity development and enhanced environment protection, however, it has been shown that socio-technical systems and ecosystem has become more vulnerable to cyber-threats, and especially this problem is particularly important to critical infrastructure in the energy sector [1] as any system malfunctioning may cause severe impact on all aspects of human living. The resilience of the any energy company to cyber security threats is a critical issue in provision of its safe and sustainable functioning.…”

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