Editorial for the special issue: vulnerability to natural hazards—the challenge of integration

Extreme geophysical events, such as those which recently occurred in the United States(hurricane Katrina), Europe and Pakistan (floods), New Zealand and Japan (earthquake andtsunami), have focused the attention of the global community to the topic of vulnerabilityto natural hazards. Why has there been so little progress in our ability to mitigate and adaptto natural hazards? White et al. (2001) summarised this paradox in an article with the title‘Knowing better and losing even more—the use of knowledge in hazard management’.While there are many reasons for this paradox, one might also state that truly interdisci-plinary research appears to be necessary to tackle this problem as it allows for the analysisof the dynamics and multi-faceted characteristics of vulnerability.Over recent years, the term vulnerability has become a buzz word in natural hazard andclimate change research. At the same time—and this is may be one reason for theincreasing popularity—vulnerability is a quite fuzzy term: Dozens of different definitionsof vulnerability have emerged and are used in different disciplinary context, e.g., in pureand applied hazard research (Fuchs 2009), in the development context (e.g. Chambers

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