Vulnerability assessment in natural hazard and risk analysis: current approaches and future challenges

Negative consequences of natural hazards are the result of both the frequency and intensity of the hazard and the vulnerability of the society or element at risk exposed. Therefore, vulnerability assessment is an essential step to reduce these consequences and consequently natural hazard risk. The assessment of vulnerability requires an ability to both identify and understand the susceptibility of elements at risk and—in a broader sense—of the society to these hazards. The concept of vulnerability is used today by various disciplines, and hence, it is embedded in multiple disciplinary theories underpinning either a technical or a social origin of the concept and resulting in a range of paradigms for either a qualitative or quantitative assessment of vulnerability. However, efforts to reduce the exposure to hazards and to create disaster-resilient communities require intersections among these theories (e.g. Hufschmidt and Glade 2010), since human activity cannot be seen independently from the environmental settings and vice versa. Acknowledging different roots of disciplinary paradigms, methods determining structural, economic, institutional or social vulnerability should be inter-woven in order to enhance our understanding of vulnerability and to adopt to ongoing global change processes. Current approaches in vulnerability research are driven by a divide between social scientists and natural scientists, even if recently some attempts have been made within to