Editorial to the special issue on resilience and vulnerability assessments in natural hazard and risk analysis

Given the conditions of global environmental change such as outlined in the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Stocker et al., 2013), impacts from natural hazards on natural and human systems are manifest worldwide (Keiler et al., 2010; Field et al., 2014). Such impacts are the result of both the frequency and magnitude of the hazard and the exposure of the society or elements at risk, such as buildings or infrastructure lines (Keiler and Fuchs, 2016), as well as underlying dynamics (e.g. Malek et al., 2015; Fuchs et al., 2017). In recent years, the concepts of vulnerability and resilience have (again) become popular in environmental hazard and risk management. Ideas and concepts of vulnerability and resilience are used by various scholars from different scientific disciplines – as well as by practitioners and institutions – and hence are used in multiple disciplinary models 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, which is scale-dependent in either case (Hufschmidt and Glade, 2010; Birkmann et al., 2013; Ciurean et al., 2013; Sudmeier-Rieux, 2014). Despite the growing amount of studies recently published, current approaches are still driven by a divide between natural and social sciences, even if some attempts have been made to bridge this gap. In acknowledgement of the different roots of disciplinary paradigms, methods determining structural, economic, institutional or social vulnerability and resilience should be interwoven in order to enhance our understanding of vulnerability and resilience, and to adapt to ongoing global change processes. Therefore, there is a need to expand our vision on hazard and risk management, integrating adaptation and mitigation approaches into the broader context of related governance arrangements (Greiving and Glade, 2013; Thaler et al., 2016). This special issue is based on contributions of session NH9.7 at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2015 held in Vienna, Austria, on 12–17 April 2015 and some additionally invited contributions. The volume presents some recent studies to summarize the assessment of different types of vulnerabilities (e.g. social, personal, structural, economic, political, environmental) and resilience for different natural hazard phenomena. The main focus herein is to show different strategies based on developments from different disciplines and to discuss these according not only to similarities but also to differences. Taking the findings and results of four special issues that were recently published in NHESS and Natural Hazards (Glade and Birkmann, 2009; Fuchs et al., 2011, 2012; Fuchs and Glade, 2016) as a starting point, this special issue contributes with interdisciplinary articles that summarize the concepts of vulnerability and resilience by using regional case studies and findings from European research projects and beyond. The special issue provides some insights into these issues and has a particular focus on different methods to determine vulnerability and resilience on a regional scale; as such it is independent from the often-published large-scale case studies where a further application of the respective method to other case studies is challenging due to the specific data requirements. The editors would like to foster a scientific discussion on such approaches in order to further stimulate the debate on vulnerability and resilience in natural hazard management.