Natural hazards such as floods, earthquakes, snow avalanches, landslides, storms or droughts occur worldwide and cause significant impacts to mankind. It has been recognized that hazard types, magnitudes, and even the frequency of occurrence do change and there is a major interest in potential forecasts for these changes. The assessment and management of risk considers aspects of individual risk, economic risk and environmental risk yielding qualitative and quantitative information which are typically subjected to substantial uncertainties. Risk assessment comprises hazard and vulnerability assessment. In the frame of hazard assessment, events are analyzed by means of recurrence intervals and spatio-temporal characteristics. In advance, hazard prone land use types are typically characterized by stage-damage functions or risk curves within vulnerability assessment.
Considerable scientific progress has been made in natural hazards research during the last decades, yet there is no consensus reached on an integrated concept and methodology for natural hazard and risk assessment. Risk assessment is typically conducted for current states of land use whereas future developments are mostly neglected. Introducing a temporal scale by considering future developments (people exposed, buildings, accumulated goods, economic growth, etc.) as well as time dependent human behavior, enables more robust risk assessment approaches also accounting for residual risk. Advanced risk management concepts should be (1) adaptable to a large range of climatic, environmental and socio-economic conditions, (2) applicable to perform scenario analysis taking into account global changes (including climate, land use, socio-economic development), and (3) directly connected to the practical demands of the stakeholders involved.

This session aims at attracting an interdisciplinary attendance from diverse research fields in both natural and social sciences. The multi-stage concept of disaster management serves as background and outline in order to have comprehensive discussions on all related aspects ranging from risk analysis including hazard and vulnerability assessment via risk mitigation and early warning to emergency response and impact assessment. The session particularly intends to cover temporal aspects of disaster risk research, including short-term and long-term temporal variability in spatial patterns of risk and vulnerability. It is aimed at developing an advanced understanding of how global changes will affect the temporal and spatial patterns of natural hazards and associated risks in a variety of territories worldwide, and how these changes can be assessed, modeled and communicated. Contributions of both conceptual and applied research are very much welcomed to this session. We are looking forward to an interesting program including innovative approaches in risk assessment and management and intend raising awareness about pending issues in integrative analysis of complex human-natural coupled systems.