Abstract for: Complex system behaviour of natural hazards in mountain regions

Natural hazards like rockfalls, avalanches, landslides and floods can have an impact on lives, settlements and infrastructures, especially in mountainous regions. For this reason, natural hazards assessment is a key factor for a sustainable settlement of these regions. Many natural hazard processes exhibit complex system behaviour like threshold processes, feedback loops and/or cascading effects. Climate change will likely affect natural hazard processes. This makes natural hazards assessment a challenging task. The focus of the work is on the development of a dynamic simulation model for process cascades in mountainous catchments. Based on this model, the long-term behaviour of typical catchment configuration will be analysed. In doing so, climate change will be taken into account. This work therefore aims to show which concepts of system dynamics are suitable to represent the complex behaviour of natural hazards processes.