Monitoring Chemical Pollution in Europe’s Seas: Programmes, practices and priorities for research

This report has been produced by the Marine Board Working Group on Existing and Emerging Chemical Pollutants (WGPOL) first convened in 2008 and tasked to examine the assessment and monitoring of existing and emerging chemicals in the European marine and coastal environment. The Working Group considered (i) existing monitoring/assessment frameworks; (ii) current monitoring practices; and (iii) new and emerging chemicals of concern and the mechanisms used to include them in current monitoring programmes. The primary conclusions and recommendations of this position paper are: 1. Fully implement state of the art environmental risk assessment procedures (combining exposure and effect assessment) to evaluate the full impact of chemical substances on the different compartments of coastal and open sea systems. 2. Further improve the coordination, cooperation and harmonization between existing monitoring efforts and those under development, to avoid duplication of effort, loss of expertise and a reduced willingness to fulfil the obligations towards regional conventions. 3. Ensure that the development and implementation of monitoring programmes for the assessment of chemicals in marine and coastal environment are based on a science-based and dynamic process. 4. Apply more resources targeted at developing appropriate approaches, tools and practices (education and training) to improve the acquisition and management of monitoring data. In addition to the above main recommendations, two further recommendations have been identified on the basis of two specific case studies which form part of this paper and which focus on the release, effects and monitoring of (i) hydrophobic and insoluble chemicals in the marine environment from merchant shipping; and (ii) chemicals released by the offshore oil-industry in the North Sea. These case studies highlighted the need to: 5. Develop a consistent, pan-European or regional (legal) framework/regulation which covers the activities of the oil and gas industry at sea. At the same time, more information and research is needed on the release and the effects of chemicals arising from offshore oil and gas activities. 6. Develop and apply state-of-the-art environmental risk assessment procedures (combining exposure and effect assessments, including on human health) to evaluate the impact of noxious liquid substances listed under MARPOL Annex II on the different compartments in coastal and open sea ecosystems

Replica placement to mitigate attacks on clouds

Execution of critical services traditionally requires multiple distinct replicas, supported by independent networks and hardware. To operate properly, these services often depend on the correctness of a fraction of replicas, usually over 2/3 or 1/2. Defying the ideal situation, economical reasons may tempt users to replicate critical services onto a single multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. Since this may expose users to correlated failures, we assess the risks for two kinds of majorities: a conventional one, related to the number of replicas, regardless of the machines where they run; and a second one, related to the physical machines where the replicas run. This latter case may exist in multi-tenant virtualized environments only. To assess these risks, under crash and Byzantine failures of virtual and physical machines, we resort to theoretical and experimental evaluation. Contrary to what one might expect, we conclude that it is not always favorable to distribute replicas evenly over a fixed number of physical machines. On the contrary, we found cases where they should be as unbalanced as possible. We systematically identify the best defense for each kind of failure and majority to preserve. We then review the most common real-life attacks on clouds and discuss the a priori placement of service replicas that minimizes the effects of these attacks