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Report n°3: Financial protection of critical infrastructure

preface by jerome contamine

Anchored in the processes of everyday life, VEOLIA Environnement's core palette of services to the environment is naturally at the centre of issues and challenges related to the planet' s sustainable development.

Protecting water, using it with care and ensuring that it is fairly distributed; processing urban and industrial wastes and giving them value; taking dynamic action to devise collective transport with least pollution and greatest safety; providing local communities and industry with innovative solutions to reduce their energy expenditure; are all endeavours which indisputably make a major contribution to environmental protection and improved quality of life.

As part of its day-to-day tasks, VEOLIA Environnement also copes with industrial, environmental and health risks. These vital issues call for continuing innovative and exacting research.

For the VEOLIA Group, with activities in over 100 countries, both routine and strategic, risk identification and control is a major challenge. The group's approach has to be pragmatic, but also includes prevention, damage limitation, sorting activities by kind, by client, or by geographic diversification and also launching appropriate and creative financial instruments. Technological know-how, an efficiently structured organisation and a corporate culture based on responsible entrepreneurship are also required to achieve risk management.

Companies cannot, however, just focus on their every day activities and ignore the extreme or catastrophic risks for which specific responses must be devised. Erwann Michel-Kerjan's work is most valuable in that it boldly calls attention to the issues raised by these risks, further heightened by geopolitical events, and proposes some solutions.

Erwann Michel-Kerjan's study is particularly informative, remarkably structured, courageous and highly stimulating. It also comes at exactly the right time in the climate of tension that we are experiencing.

Jérôme CONTAMINE
Senior Executive Vice President
VEOLIA Environnement

"Insurance is a kind of game in which players need to be extremely cautious. Chance events must be analyzed, and players be skilled in the science of calculating probabilities; they need to foresee hazards at sea, and hazards wrought by bad faith; they must not fail to keep watch for exceptional and bizarre events; they must combine all together, compare with premium rates, and assess the final result.

Such speculation is the work of genius. However, if theory, guided by experience, is only too often faulty, what of the fate of tradesmen who, lured by the prospect of gain, sign policies presented to them without due consideration for the dangers into which blind fortune and their own recklessness may lead them?"

B.M. Emerigon - A Treatise on Insurances, 1827