Alexander Fekete

TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences · Institute of Rescue Engineering and Civil Protection

Emergency management services, such as firefighting, rescue teams and ambulances, are all heavily reliant on road networks. However, even for highly industrialised countries such as Germany, and even for large cities, spatial planning tools are lacking for road network interruptions of emergency services. Moreover, dependencies of emergency managem...

Citation: Fekete, A.; Bross, L.; Krause, S.; Neisser, F.; Tzavella, K. Bridging Gaps in Minimum Humanitarian Standards and Shelter Planning by Critical Infrastructures. Sustainability 2021, 13, 849. Abstract: Current agendas such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction or the Sustainable Development Goals are demanding more integration...

Pluvial floods claimed more than 180 lives in Germany in July 2021, when a large and slow-moving storm system affected Germany and many neighbouring countries. The death tolls and damages were the highest since 1962 in Germany, and soon after, the crisis management was under public critique. This study has undertaken an online survey to understand...

In recent years, Germany has seen an increase in forest fires, and many fires have occurred in military training areas that are difficult to access for firefighting. While casualties are still low and mostly restricted to firefighting personnel, settlements are also increasingly threatened. Increasing impacts from extreme events due to climate chan...

One of the most important factors when assessing the resilience of critical infrastructure is its vulnerability to extreme events. This study focuses on developing correlation maps that define the vulnerability to fire risk of critical infrastructure and its zone of influence. Using an index approach, a vulnerability assessment is challenging due t...

The article focuses explicitly on transformation and analyzes how it can be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively in a case study region in western Germany. It addresses blue, critical, and green infrastructures in a region that was affected by the 2021 floods in Europe. Together with regional actors, co-creative solutions for developing a...

Mozambique is confronted with numerous risks related to food security and natural disasters. The study conducted a literature review on natural hazards and food security. This can help to identify gaps and further areas of research. A bibliometric analysis was conducted using standardized text search terms, and the VOSviewer tool was used to analyz...

Airports are a vital transportation infrastructure in our interconnected world. Securing this infrastructure is a top priority of both the industry and politics. Airports are susceptible to various disruptions that can significantly impact operations, potentially leading to prolonged shutdowns. These disruptions can span multiple interdisciplinary...

Der vorliegende Leitfaden formuliert Handlungsempfehlungen, die auf Ergebnissen und Erfahrungen des Projektes NOWATER beruhen. Er soll gleichermaßen Anstoß als auch Anleitung sein, sich mit dem Thema Notfallvorsorgeplanung für den Ausfall bzw. die Beeinträchtigung der Wasserversorgung in Einrichtungen des Gesundheitswesens zu befassen.

Das „Notfallkonzept für Infrastrukturausfälle im Krankenhaus“ bietet unverbindliche Hilfestellungen für die Ereignisbewältigung bei Beeinträchtigung der Wasser- und Stromversorgung und Abwasserentsorgung in Form von Checklisten und Ablaufdiagrammen an. Herzstück ist der 10-Punkte-Plan für die akute Bewältigung eines Infrastrukturausfalls. The “Eme...

Das „Übungskonzept für Infrastrukturausfälle im Krankenhaus“ versteht sich als Handbuch, mit dem Sie eine für Ihr Krankenhaus passende Schulungsmaßnahme oder Übung auswählen, vorbereiten, durchführen und nachbereiten können. The “Exercise concept for infrastructure failures in hospitals” is intended as a handbook with which you can select, prepare,...

Critical infrastructures, which constitute the backbone of our modern society, are increasingly exposed to natural hazards. Loss of performance or failure of a critical infrastructure can lead to cascading effects that affect even more services and citizens. Floods, as one of the most prominent natural hazards, are prone to affect multiple critical...

The floods in 2021 in Germany laid bare the need to better integrate volunteers into official disaster management. An online survey with 1767 valid interviews after the floods in July 2021 reveals the shared experiences of professional and non-professional groups. Communication and coordination problems are the main results of the survey analysis....

Hydrological extremes, such as droughts and floods, can trigger a complex web of compound and cascading impacts (CCI) due to interdependencies between coupled natural and social systems. However, current decision‐making processes typically only consider one impact and disaster event at a time, ignoring causal chains, feedback loops, and conditional...

Dieses Buch bietet allen Interessierten einen Einstieg in das Thema der Risiko-, Katastrophen- und Resilienzforschung. Es stellt eine schrittweise Anleitung für Risiko- und Verwundbarkeitsanalysen sowie Konzepte für Resilienz dar und illustriert anhand von Fallstudien, insbesondere im Bereich des Hochwasserrisikos. Darüber hinaus werden erstmals za...

Airports are a vital transportation infrastructure in our interconnected world. Securing this infrastructure is a top priority of both the industry and politics. Airports are susceptible to various disruptions that can significantly impact operations, potentially leading to prolonged shutdowns. These disruptions can span multiple interdisciplinary...

Pluvial and riverine floods affected many areas worldwide in 2021. To better prepare for future disasters, understanding the areas of emergency and the need for disaster management improvement is necessary. This study analyzes the results of several online surveys amongst professionals and voluntary helpers active in the 2021 flood operations in Ge...

Disasters such as the Ahr Valley flood in 2021 make us aware of the importance of functioning healthcare facilities. Their functionality depends on the availability of drinking water. Water safety planning is a long-established method to increase the safety of water utilities. Our work supports the implementation of water safety planning in healthc...

There is a growing tendency to assess resilience and sustainability of critical infrastructures (CI), given the significant increment in high-impact natural hazard events affecting socio-economic welfare. Historically, these assessments have been conducted separately due to the independent evolution of each concept. However, recent contributions te...

Supplementary material related to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103967. Schools and other educational institutions are important pillars for the well-being of society. However, education continuity is increasingly threatened by negative influences such as disasters and acts of violence. An important tool...

Climate change increasingly prompts research on interrelated risks. This study analyzed research on East Africa and multiple risks. A literature review was conducted using bibliometric analysis with the VOSviewer tool and Web of Science. The main findings are that for many countries in East Africa, studies are absent, even on single risk assessment...

This protocol specifies the methodological procedure for the identification of methodologies to quantify education system resilience in a scoping review. The associated scoping review (journal pre-proof) is available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212420923004478

Hydrological extremes, such as droughts and floods, can trigger a complex web of compound and cascading impacts due to interdependencies between coupled natural and social systems. However, current decision-making processes typically only consider one impact and disaster event at a time, ignoring causal chains, feedback loops, and conditional depen...

Das Thema Klimawandel ist inzwischen in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung präsent, sei es durch Starkregen oder Waldbrände der letzten Jahre. Die Akteure im Katastrophenschutz einer Stadt, wie Feuerwehren und Rettungsdienste, müssen sich auch um die Folgen des Klimawandels, jedoch primär um Alltagseinsätze zu kümmern. Die Flutereignisse im Juli 2021 in...

In the response of the flood disaster in Germany 2021 a vast number of spontaneous volunteers (SVs) participated. They organized coordinating services, developed emergent forms of SVs and thus hold the potential to improve existing flood managing capacities. This raises the need for in‐depth knowledge about SVs and organization, the use of informat...

Scientifically analyzing and documenting climate change and related disaster risks is demanded by international organizations such as the United Nations. However, global or national studies predominate, and cross-regional overviews are lacking, especially for Western Asia. In four countries in the region, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, tra...

Urban governance and planning systems are central cornerstones of international research and policy initiatives to advance sustainable development, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction in the context of increasing global environmental change. Yet, the inherent processes and components of conventional governance and planning system...

Industrial accidents have shown that many people can be affected, such as in Seveso, Italy, in 1976. Industrial accidents in nuclear power plants have also led to fatalities and evacuations. To better guide preparedness against and mitigation of industrial accidents, an assessment is necessary to evaluate hazard exposure and the type of potentially...

Transformative disaster resilience in times of climate change underscores the importance of reflexive governance, facilitation of socio-technical advancement, co-creation of knowledge, and innovative and bottom-up approaches. However, implementing these capacity-building processes by relying on census-based datasets and nomothetic (or top-down) app...

Several European countries were affected by severe floods in 2021. At the same time, despite the deployment of vaccines, Europe was the COVID-19 pandemic's epicenter several times during 2021. One research aim of this study is to identify socio-demographic groups vulnerable to floods and whether the groups vulnerable to floods and pandemics overlap...

Die Hochwasser- oder Flutereignisse aufgrund von Starkregen im Juli 2021 haben in Deutschland und angrenzenden Ländern ein bis dato nicht bekanntes Ausmaß an Todesopfern und Verlusten hinterlassen. Es ist wichtig aus solchen Ereignissen zu lernen, um künftig besser auf solche Situationen vorbereitet zu sein. Dieser Sam-melband beinhaltet Erfahrungs...

Nowadays, an increasing number of crises worldwide, triggered by climate extremes, natural and human-made hazards, the coronavirus pandemic, and more, pose a high pressure on crisis, emergency, and disaster management. Spatial data and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) are key issues in the successful and immediate response to crises. This p...

Exposure is an essential component of risk models and describes elements that are endangered by a hazard and susceptible to damage. The associated vulnerability characterizes the likelihood of experiencing damage (which can translate into losses) at a certain level of hazard intensity. Frequently, the compilation of exposure information is the cost...

New risk geographies are emerging with war and conflict resurfacing, including nuclear threats. This poses challenges to civil protection for conducting risk-informed preparedness planning. A spatial assessment of Germany and Europe is conducted using a geographic information system. Buffer circles of nuclear explosion effects and fallout buffers s...

Climate change favors the establishment of new pests in Germany, which now find suitable habitats here due to the changed climate. Field locusts occur repeatedly as agricultural pests in southern European countries. Therefore, it is investigated whether the climate change-induced northward shift of warmer zones can create climatically suitable habi...

Kenya experiences massive urban growth, also into natural hazard-prone areas, exposing settlements and the natural environment to riverine and pluvial floods and other natural hazards. While Nairobi as the capital and principal city has been extensively analysed regarding urban growth and flood hazard in some central parts, awareness of growing per...

One of the key challenges for risk, vulnerability and resilience research is how to address the role of risk perceptions and how perceptions influence behaviour. It remains unclear why people fail to act adaptively to reduce future losses, even when there is ever-richer information available on natural and human-made hazards (flood, drought, etc.)....

While nuclear power plants (NPP) are built back in Germany, the exposure risk will remain for some time being. This study conducts a geospatial analysis in exposure radii from 5 to 80 km around 41 NPP sites in and around Germany. The results show that 40 out of 113 major cities are exposed, and that vulnerability patterns vary. Foreigners and women...

Growing urbanisation and climate extremes prompt urban research on vulnerability and resilience. At the same time, socioecological impacts and interactions are studied in equally affected rural areas as well. However, interlinkages between urban and rural research and vulnerability and resilience also need attention. Mutual interdependencies exist...

Change triggered by natural hazards such as pluvial and coastal floods, sea-level rise as well as risks resulting from water scarcity are highly dynamic and related to the effects of ongoing climate change. Whether and how societies adapt, adjust, change, or transform because of climate change and related risks, is a currently debated topic. This q...

The poster shows a brief overview of the research project NOWATER which investigates the organizational and technical aspects of drinking water outages and sewage water impairments in hospitals to maintain business continuity and strengthen the resilience of healthcare facilities. The concept of interaction between technical as well as organization...

Funktionierendes Krisenmanagement ist eine große Herausforderung für alle – Gesellschaft, Infrastrukturbetreiber, Städte und Kommunen –, da es sowohl an genauen regionalen Kenntnissen über die Gefahren als auch über mögliche Folgen und erforderliche Vorsorge- und Anpassungsmaßnahmen in vielen Bereichen mangelt. Ein Grundsatz der Risiko- und Sicherh...

COVID-19 hat den Blick auf den Bereich Lieferkettenabhängigkeit und systemrelevante Berufe geschärft. Beides sind Beispiele aus dem Bereich KRITIS, die auf die zunehmende globale Vernetzung und die Bedeutung von Menschen als Teile einer Infrastruktur hinweisen. Daher sind digitale Unterstützungsprozesse für das Krisen- und Katastrophenmanagement vo...

Exposure is an essential component of risk models and describes elements that are endangered by a hazard and susceptible to damage. The associated vulnerability characterizes the likelihood of experiencing damage (which can translate into losses) at a certain level of hazard intensity. Frequently, the compilation of exposure information is the cost...

This paper examines transformative resilience as the common challenge for urban/regional governance and planning systems in two contrasting contexts from the Global North (Germany) and the Global South (Iran). The aim is to reveal the pathways and trade-offs through which governance and planning systems interactions constrain or open opportunities...

An der bundesweiten Umfrage unter Spontanhelfenden der Flutkatastrophe 2021 haben im Zeitraum vom 28.10.-12.12.2021 über 2500 Personen teilgenommen. Ein herzliches Dankeschön gilt an dieser Stelle Allen, die an dieser Umfrage teilgenommen und bei ihrer Verbreitung mitgewirkt haben! Die Umfrage gibt einen detaillierten Einblick in verschiedene Berei...

Resilience in the urban context can be described as a continuum of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. The need to move toward a sustainable future and bounce forward after any disruption has led recent urban resilience initiatives to engage with the concept of transformative resilience when and where conventional and top-down resi...

One of the key challenges for risk, vulnerability, and resilience research is how to address the role of risk perceptions and how perceptions influence behaviour. It remains unclear why people fail to act adaptively to reduce future losses, even when there is ever richer information available on natural and human-made hazards (flood, drought, etc.)...

Analysis of climate change risks in support of policymakers to set effective adaptation policies requires an innovative yet rigorous approach towards integrated modelling (IM) of social-ecological systems (SES). Despite continuous advances, IM still faces various challenges that span through both unresolved methodological issues as well as data req...

Article in BBK Bevölkerungsschutz 4/2021. Pages 38-41. It presents an analysis of the satisfaction of emergency workers and helpers in the 2021 and 2013 flood operations in Germany. In German language

The Second ENCORE European conference in October 2021 in Paris, France, has gathered two communities, the Risk Perception and Behaviour Survey of Surveyors (Risk-SoS) and the H2020-DRS01 Cluster on risk perception and adaptive behaviour (a grouping of several Horizon Europe – Disaster Resilient Societies projects, most notably RESILOC, ENGAGE, Risk...

Kenya experiences massive urban growth, also into natural hazard-prone areas, exposing settlements and the natural environment to riverine and pluvial floods and other natural hazards. While Nairobi as the capital and principal city has been extensively analysed regarding urban growth and flood hazard in some central parts, awareness of growing per...

Remote sensing applications of change detection are increasingly in demand for many areas of land use and urbanization, and disaster risk reduction. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the New Urban Agenda by the United Nations call for risk monitoring. This study maps and assesses the urban area changes of 23 Mexican-USA border ci...

Floods are a known natural hazard in Germany, but the amount of precipitation and ensuing high death toll and damages after the events especially from 14 to 15 July 2021 came as a surprise. Almost immediately questions about failure in the early warning chains and the effectiveness of the German response emerged, also internationally. This article...

Die jüngsten Ereignisse verdeutlichen es drastisch: Wetter-Ausschläge werden extremer. Im Juli 2021 waren es extreme Niederschläge in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Bayern und Sachsen, 2018 und 2019 litt Deutschland unter einer langanhaltenden Trockenheit und Hitze. Jüngere Klimastudien zeigen, dass die Wahrscheinlichkeit für beide Extreme z...

Water-related hazard events are extreme hydrological phenomena that cause loss of lives, injuries, damage to properties, socio-economic and environmental impacts. Damage can be reduced by using control and mitigation measures that can be classified as structural and non-structural measures. This chapter introduces several, even seldom considered ha...

In the context of earthquake risk, a vulnerability and resilience perspective has changed a purely technological orientation in facing natural hazards. One aspect of this change is the increasing awareness to include indigenous, traditional knowledge, community-based action, and local practices as well as experience from historic events in earthqua...

Participation is an often-demanded process in disaster risk reduction (DRR). However, it is often unclear who understands what under this term. International organizations such as the United Nations have promoted participation in their DRR strategies since the 1980s, but further research is needed on its opportunities and limitations. Here we highl...

Fekete, Alexander (2021) Kritische Infrastrukturen und Bevölkerungsschutz bei Starkregenereignissen. In: Holger Schüttrumpf (Hrsg.) 50. IWASA Internationales Wasserbau-Symposium Aachen 2020. 20. Starkregenforum 9. und 10. Januar 2020. Mitteilungen d. Lehrstuhls u. Instituts f. Wasserbau u. Wasserwirtschaft, RWTH Aachen University – Band 175. 58-65....

The drinking water supply is a core element of national regulations for normal and emergency supply as well as coping with crisis events. Particularly with regard to the interdependence of critical infrastructures means that water supply failures can have far-reaching consequences and endanger the safety of a society, e.g., by impairing hospital op...

In 2015, massive earthquakes of 7.8 and 7.4 magnitude struck Nepal. This resulted in severe economic and infrastructural damage, not to mention many human casualties. The government of Nepal has identified 625,000 houses as fully destroyed and 180,000 houses as being partially damaged. This research is a comparative study of traditional-urban, peri...

Die Wasserver- und -entsorgung sind nicht nur Bestandteile der Daseinsvorsorge, beide gehöre auch zu den sog. Kritischen Infrastrukturen (KRITIS), bei deren Ausfall empfindliche Störungen der Grundversorgung und Gefährdungen für Leben und Gesundheit bis hin zur Störung der Öffentlichen Sicherheit resultieren können. Diese Rolle der Wasserwirtschaft...

OPEN ACCESS: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/22/9324 This article explores the relationship between digital transformation and disaster risk. Vulnerability studies aim at differentiating impacts and losses by using fine-grained information from demographic, social, and personal characteristics of humans. With ongoing digital development, these ch...