Natural and technological disasters of the past have shown that such incidences significantly affect local and regional development. Faced with the task of ensuring economic, human and environmental development as well as insuring physical structures, planning authorities, insurance companies and emergency managers are looking for methodologies to identify highly sensitive areas in terms of their overall risk. Existing methodologies like the Natural Hazard Index for Megacities or the Total Place Vulnerability Index have limitations due to their sectoral approach, which makes them less useful for integrated spatial planning. This paper presents the Integrated Risk Assessment of Multi-Hazards as a new approach to serve as a basis for a spatial risk management process. The approach integrates various hazards into an integrated hazard map, combines this with the region's vulnerability and thus produces an integrated risk map. Moreover, the methodology offers a tool to derive weighting factors for hazards as well as for vulnerability components.

The present work addresses the problem of lack of coordination between policies and actors with joint competence for risk management, i.e., civil protection, spatial planning, and sectoral planning (e.g., forest policy in the case of forest fire risk). Spatial planning in particular is assigned a minor or no role at all though it might perfectly operate as the coordinating policy platform; the reason is that spatially relevant analysis and policy guidance is an omnipresent component of the risk management cycle. However, disconnected risk relevant policies turning a blind eye to spatial planning might cause several adverse repercussions: Breaks in the response-preparedness-prevention-remediation chain (which should function as a continuum), minimal attention to prevention, risk expansion and growth instead of mitigation, lack of synergies between involved actors as well as duplicated or even diverging measures and funding. The authors bear witness to the above suggestions by examining three cases of European (regional and local) risk management systems faced with failures when confronting natural hazards (floods and forest fires).

The aim of this article is to give an overview and systematic characterization of different national approaches to developing strategies of climate change adaptation from a spatial planning or regional development perspective, respectively. Based on this analysis, recommendations are made for the implementation of the Territorial Agenda of the European Union. The central research hypotheses addressed in this article are: (1) climate change impacts in Europe are distributed differently in European regions which influence the design of national adaptation strategies (NASs) in Europe as well as the planning-related fields of action; (2) the legal framework and the political-administrative system significantly determine how national adaptation responses are designed and by which institutions they are implemented and (3) spatial planning has the potential to play an important role in climate change adaptation due to its integrative, cross-sectoral character. In order to discuss the hypotheses, a meta-evaluation of already existing assessments of climate adaptation strategies was carried out, as well as nine indepth country studies (Finland, and the UK). The results show that spatial planning is only given minor attention in the assessed analyses and national strategies and that it is rather a matter of political willingness and capacity building than particular instruments or a high climate change vulnerability if spatial planning, however, plays an important role in an NAS.

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Abstract. The EU Flood Risk Management Directive 2007/60/EC aims at an active involvement of interested parties in the setting up of flood risk management plans and thus calls for more governance-related decision-making. This requirement has two perspectives. On the one hand, there is (1) the question of how decision-makers can improve the quality of their governance process. On the other hand, there is (2) the question of how the public shall be appropriately informed and involved. These questions were the centre of the ERA-Net CRUE-funded project IMRA (integrative flood risk governance approach for improvement of risk awareness) that aimed at an optimisation of the flood risk management process by increasing procedural efficiency with an explicit involvement strategy. To reach this goal, the IMRA project partners developed two new approaches that were implemented in three case study areas for the first time in flood risk management:1. risk governance assessment tool: An indicator-based benchmarking and monitoring tool was used to evaluate the performance of a flood risk management system in regard to ideal risk governance principles;2. social milieu approach: The concept of social milieus was used to gain a picture of the people living in the case study regions to learn more about their lifestyles, attitudes and values and to use this knowledge to plan custom-made information and participation activities for the broad public.This paper presents basic elements and the application of two innovative approaches as a part of an "involvement strategy" that aims at the active involvement of all interested parties (stakeholders) for assessing, reviewing and updating flood risk management plans, as formulated in the EU Flood Risk Management Directive 2007/60/EC.

This paper presents the results of an assessment made as a part of the research project, Applied Multi-Risk Mapping of Natural Hazards for Impact Assessment (ARMONIA). The aim was to identify which aspects in the so-called disaster management cycle are covered by spatial planning in planning practice in the European Union's member states of Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK. In contrast to the initial hypothesis, the analysis of planning practice has shown that the role of spatial planning in risk assessment and management in many ways has been overestimated. The results have shown that spatial planning is only one of many actors in risk management and that it is, in general, not involved in risk assessment. Further, multi-risk assessment approaches are not used in planning practice, risk indicators are hardly used and vulnerability indicators are not at all used. The paper will interpret these surprising results and will answer the question of the role of spatial planning in natural risk assessment and management.

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