Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences

The last two years set a sad record in the number and scale of natural disasters and clearly demonstrated the high vulnera-bility of our modern society to the impact of natural events. In 2010 and the first semester of 2011 natural disasters killed more than 320 000 people across the world and economic losses soared to 320 billion US $ (CRED, 2011a, b). A very serious secondary effect of natural disasters are so-called Natech accidents that take place when natural events trigger accidents at technological installations that house or process hazardous materials, such as nuclear power plants, chemical facilities, oil refineries or pipelines. One of the most large-scale Natech accidents occurred on 11 March 2011 in Japan as a result of a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the northeast coast of Honshu Is-land, that reportedly caused a tsunami with a height of mor