Annegret H. Thieken

Universität Potsdam · Institute of Environmental Science and Geography

Urban growth and an increase in urban poverty are important drivers of disaster risk. However, to what extent these processes influence the dynamics of exposure and vulnerability remains uncertain. We hereby contribute to this discussion by presenting key lessons learned from the multi-hazard event that hit the North Coast of São Paulo (NCSP), Braz...

A rapidly growing population across mountain regions is pressuring expansion onto steeper slopes, leading to increased exposure of people and their assets to slow‐moving landslides. These moving hillslopes can inflict damage to buildings and infrastructure, accelerate with urban alterations, and catastrophically fail with climatic and weather extre...

Der vorliegende wissenschaftliche Bericht stellt die Ergebnisse der repräsentativen "Kommunalbefragung Klimaanpassung 2023“ dar und gibt ein umfassendes und differenziertes Bild des aktuellen Standes und Fortschritts der kommunalen Klimaanpassung in Deutschland. Durch die Berücksichtigung der unterschiedlichen kommunalen Strukturen und Bedürfnisse...

The devastating floods that swept through the Ahr valley in July 2021 left indelible marks on the region's landscape and communities. Beyond the visible damage, experience from other events suggests an increase in mental health issues among those affected. However, there is a lack of data and understanding regarding the impact of flooding on mental...

Integrated risk management requires all stakeholders to work together proactively. Residents of floodplains can participate by implementing property-level adaptive measures. Risk communication materials can motivate those households to do so. Research on these materials is limited. Therefore, we systematically assessed freely available German risk...

Hitze und Starkregen können negative Auswirkungen auf die Gesundheit von Menschen auch in Deutschland haben. Insbesondere vulnerable Gruppen wie Kinder und Ältere sind einem erhöhten Risiko ausgesetzt und bedürfen der besonderen Vorsorge. Diese Arbeit untersucht, wie Gefahren durch Hitze und Starkregen in der kommunalen Verwaltung und bei Trägern v...

Spatial constraints are fundamental to integrating the spatial suitability to urbanization into Cellular Automata-based (CA) urban growth models, but there is a lack of consensus on the optimal methods for this purpose. This study compared the performance of three probabilistic classifiers to generate suitability surfaces for CA-based urban growth...

Flood damage data are needed for various applications. Structural damage ofbuildings can reflect not only the economic damage but also the life-threatening condition of a building, which provide crucial information fordisaster response and recovery. Since traditional on-site data collection shortlyafter a disaster is challenging, remote sensing dat...

The devastating floods that swept through the Ahr Valley in July 2021 left indelible marks on the region's landscape and communities. Beyond the visible damage, experience from other events suggests an increase in mental health issues among those affected. However, there is a lack of data and understanding regarding the impact of flooding on mental...

Heat poses a crucial threat to human health, and infants and young children are considered as especially vulnerable. Therefore, staff in childcare facilities are responsible for taking actions to minimize health effects caused by heat. So far, however, little is known about the impacts of heat and how heat is dealt with in childcare facilities. To...

The rapidly growing population in many mountain regions is pressuring expansion onto steeper slopes, increasingly exposing people and their assets to slow-moving landslides [1, 2, 3, 4]. These moving hillslopes can inflict damage to buildings and infrastructure [5, 6], accelerate with urban alterations [7, 8], and catastrophically fail with climati...

Extreme heat poses severe health threats, as the increased numbers of hospitalizations and fatalities during heat waves show, though little is known about adaptive behavior toward heat. We conducted a household survey on individual perceptions of heat stress and individual heat protection in the summer and autumn of 2019. In total, 1417 people from...

Whether and how flood-affected people prepare for flooding is commonly assumed to depend on their perception of the risk, coping options, and responsibilities. Furthermore, the influence of different flood types, i.e., fluvial, flash, and urban pluvial floods, is unclear, but might be relevant for effective risk communication. Up to now, risk commu...

Climate-related hazards severely threaten human lives and livelihoods and are projected to increase due to global warming. Early warning systems are essential in mitigating losses, and community-based early warning systems (CBEWS) aim to empower at-risk communities for better preparedness and response. Though CBEWS have been implemented in several...

Citation: DKKV (Hrsg., 2024): Governance und Kommunikation im Krisenfall des Hochwasserereignisses im Juli 2021, DKKV-Schriftenreihe Nr. 63, Januar 2024, Bonn

During the severe flooding in July 2021 189 people lost their lives in Germany, which is the highest number of flood-related fatalities since 1962. 49 people died in the densely populated state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), whose flood risk management has, however, often been regarded as pioneering in Germany. To further improve flood risk manag...

The historical rainfall recorded at the coast of São Paulo State during the Carneval weekend of 2023, surpassing 600 mm in less than 24h, lead to 571 landslides, more than 1000 people displaced and 64 deaths in São Sebastião. Disaster impacts result from the interplay of hazard processes, exposure of human settlements and infrastructures, and their...

Das Projekt HoWas20211 untersucht die Bewältigung der Starkregen- und Hochwasserereignisse im Juli 2021 in Nordrhein-Westfalen und Rheinland-Pfalz. Durch die Zusammen- arbeit verschiedener Fachdisziplinen (Hydrologie/Meteorologie, Kommunikationswissenschaft, Verwaltungswissenschaft, geographische Risikoforschung und sozialwissenschaftliche Kat...

Climate resilience and building back better (BBB) are key concepts in the present disaster risk/resilience discourse; however, these concepts often remain vague for many stakeholders involved in recovery. Based on the reconstruction process in Germany after the extreme floods of 2021 with that caused more than 180 deaths, we explore challenges and...

Management of adverse health-related effects from heat waves requires comprehensive and accessible sources of information. This paper examines the effects of temperature and air pollution on human health and identifies areas with increased occurrence of emergency ambulance dispatches in the city of Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany, and discusses the appl...

Individual precautionary behaviour in response to flooding can considerably reduce flood impacts. Therefore, understanding its drivers and temporal dynamics is of high interest for risk management and communication. Previous studies are mostly based on temporally limited data by using cross-sectional surveys. Here we identified and characterised di...

Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) has become a widely-used theoretical framework to explain the risk-reducing behavior of individuals toward flooding and other natural hazards. Despite a quickly growing body of literature applying PMT in the context of flooding, insights into changes in PMT components and risk-reducing behavior are largely lacking...

Flood risk assessments require different disciplines to understand and model the underlying components hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Many methods and data sets have been refined considerably to cover more details of spatial, temporal, or process information. We compile case studies indicating that refined methods and data have a considerable...

Land degradation adversely affects the well-being of approximately 3.2 billion people worldwide and results in a loss of about 10% of annual gross domestic product. Degradation dynamics are often creeping and non-linear, hence the adverse consequences are often not immediately perceived. In consequence, methods for assessing future risks of land de...

In July 2021 intense rainfall caused devastating floods in western Europe and 184 fatalities in the German federal states of North Rhine-Westphalia (NW) and Rhineland-Palatinate (RP), calling into question their flood forecasting, warning and response system (FFWRS). Data from an online survey (n=1315) reveal that 35 % of the respondents from NW an...

Nature‐based solutions (NBS) have gained popularity as a sustainable and effective way of dealing with increasing flood risks. One of the key factors that often hinders the successful implementation of NBS is residents’ opposition to their implementation. In this study, we argue that the place where a hazard exists should be considered a critical c...

Flood risk management in Germany follows an integrative approach in which both private households and businesses can make an important contribution to reducing flood damage by implementing property-level adaptation measures. While the flood adaptation behavior of private households has already been widely researched, comparatively less attention ha...

The Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) is a tectonically active region, making it susceptible to natural and man-made disasters. The Himalayan state of Uttarakhand has a history of disasters that cause huge loss of life and property every year. Tourism plays an imperative role in the state's economy due to its natural resources and pilgrimage sites. To...

Extreme precipitation is a weather phenomenon with tremendous damaging potential for property and human life. As the intensity and frequency of such events is projected to increase in a warming climate, there is an urgent need to advance the existing knowledge on extreme precipitation processes, statistics and impacts across scales. To this end, a...

Analysis of flood hazard in the Ahr Valley considering historical floods Die Hochwasserkatastrophe im Juli 2021 in Westdeutschland erfordert eine kritische Diskussion über die Abschätzung der Hoch-wassergefährdung, Aktualisierung von Hochwassergefahrenkarten und Kommunikation von extremen Hochwasserszenarien. In der vor-liegenden Arbeit wurde die E...

Due to their agglomeration of population, material assets and infrastructures, cities are particularly affected by extreme weather events such as heavy rain and heat. Numerous flooding events as a result of heavy rainfall occurred in various regions of Germany in the last years, not only resulted in losses in the double- to triple-digit million ran...

Various regions in Europe were hit by extreme rainfall from July 12 to 19, 2021 generated by a quasi-stationary atmospheric low pressure system named “Bernd”. The mainly affected areas were two federal states in western Germany and adjacent regions in Belgium. The July flood was the costliest natural disaster in Germany in recent history, with loss...

Flood risk management in Germany follows an integrative approach in which both private households and businesses can make an important contribution to reducing flood damage by implementing property-level adaptation measures. While the flood adaptation behavior of private households has already been widely researched, comparatively less attention ha...

Aufgrund der hohen Konzentration von Bevölkerung, ökonomischen Werten und Infrastrukturen können Städte stark von extremen Wetterereignissen getroffen werden. Insbesondere Hitzewellen und Überflutungen in Folge von Starkregen verursachen in Städten immense gesundheitliche und finanzielle Schäden. Um Schäden zu verringern oder gar zu vermeiden, ist...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) have gained popularity as a sustainable and effective way of dealing with flood risk. Understanding factors that shape public attitudes toward NBS are essential for minimizing resistance towards successful project implementation. In this work, we developed a hybrid theoretical framework that encompasses theories of risk...

Rapidly evolving floods are rare but powerful drivers of landscape reorganisation that have severe and long-lasting impacts on both the functions of a landscape’s subsystems and the affected society. The July 2021 flood that particularly hit several river catchments of the Eifel region in western Germany and Belgium was a drastic example. While med...

A reliable estimation of flood impacts enables meaningful flood risk management and rapid assessments of flood impacts shortly after a flood. The flood in 2021 in Central Europe revealed that these estimations are still inadequate. Therefore, we investigate the influence of different data sets and methods aiming to improve flood impact estimates. W...

In July 2021 intense rainfall caused devastating floods in Western Europe and 184 fatalities in the German federal states of North Rhine-Westphalia (NW) and Rhineland-Palatinate (RP) questioning their flood forecasting, warning and response system (FFWRS). Data from an online survey (n = 1315) reveal that 35% of the respondents from NW and 29% from...

Extreme precipitation is a weather phenomenon with tremendous damaging potential for property and human life. As the intensity and frequency of such events is projected to increase in a warming climate, there is an urgent need to advance the existing knowledge on extreme precipitation processes, statistics and impacts across scales. To this end, a...

Rapidly evolving floods are rare but powerful drivers of landscape reorganisation that have severe and long lasting impacts on both the functions of a landscape’s subsystems and the affected society. The July 2021 flood that particularly hit several river catchments of the Eifel region in West Germany and Belgium was a drastic example. While media...

There is a movement towards the concepts of integrated flood risk management and governance. In these concepts, each stakeholder prone to flooding is tasked with actively limiting flood impacts. Currently, relatively more research has focused upon the adaptation of private households and not on private businesses operating in flood-prone areas. Thi...

Several severe flood events hit Germany in recent years, with events in 2013 and 2016 being the most destructive ones, although dynamics and flood processes were very different. While the 2013 event was a slowly rising widespread fluvial flood accompanied by some severe dike breaches, the events in 2016 were fast-onset pluvial floods, which resulte...

Integrated flood risk management requires all stakeholders to limit flood impacts. Adaptation to flooding is a major avenue through which society designs our living spaces to cope with the threat of flooding. Within this context, there are many studies investigating the employment of property-level adaptation for households and the related decision...

Dieser Bevölkerungsschutz befindet sich heute einmal mehr im Wandel. Zunehmende extreme Ereignisse wie die Corona-Pandemie, die Hochwasserereignisse vor allem in Rheinland-Pfalz und Nordrhein-Westfalen im Sommer 2021 oder die Waldbrände in Südeuropa unterstreichen die hohe Bedeutung des Bevölkerungsschutzes in Deutschland. Bisherige Strategien wer...

Abstract Cities can be severely affected by climate change. Hence, many of them have started to develop climate adaptation strategies or implement measures to help prepare for the challenges it will present. This study aims to provide an overview of climate adaptation in 104 German cities. While existing studies on adaptation tracking rely heavily...

Extreme heat is a much underestimated health risk, which poses a threat especially to vulnerable groups such as the elderly or people with pre-existing medical conditions, but also young children. With heat waves occurring more often and lasting longer in Germany, medical facilities and care facilities for children and the elderly carry responsibil...

Research on climate change and impacts of natural hazards, such as heat waves, on human health has increased in recent years. Different approaches are used to study people's attitudes and behaviour, but little is known about the extent to which the use of different methods or other environmental variables influence the results. Therefore, we examin...

Every year, millions of people are affected by flooding. In addition to physical destruction, current research suggests that foods can also have considerable effects on the mental health of those affected. However, the literature in this research domain is still scarce, focuses on developed countries, and mostly employs cross-sectional research des...

Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German...

Heat waves are increasingly common in many countries across the globe, and also in Germany, where this study is set. Heat poses severe health risks, especially for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and children. This case study explores visitors’ behavior and perceptions during six weekends in the summer of 2018 at a six-month open-air horticul...

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...

A Correction to this paper has been published: 10.1007/s10584-021-03184-z

Vor 217 Jahren, am 21. Juli 1804, traf ein verheerendes Hochwasser das Ahrtal. Die Schilderungen der Verwüstungen – zahlreiche Todesopfer, zerstörte Häuser und Brücken – ähneln sehr den Bildern, die uns seit dem 14. Juli aus dem Ahrtal und benachbarten Regionen erreichen, obwohl seit Jahrzehnten Hochwasserschutz und weitergehende Hochwasservorsorg...

In recent years, German cities were heavily impacted by pluvial flooding and related damage is projected to increase due to climate change and urbanisation. It is important to ask how to improve urban pluvial flood risk management. To understand the current state of property level adaptation, a survey was conducted in four municipalities that had r...

Climate mitigation and climate adaptation are crucial tasks for urban areas and can involve synergies as well as trade-offs. However, few studies have examined how mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to each other in a large number of differently sized cities, and therefore we know little about whether forerunners in mitigation are also leadin...

Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German...

Social inequalities lead to flood resilience inequalities across social groups, a topic that requires improved documentation and understanding. The objective of this paper is to attend to these differences by investigating self-stated flood recovery across genders in Vietnam as a conceptual replication of earlier results from Germany. This study em...

Causing damage to human well-being, ecosystems, infrastructure and disrupting entire economies, disasters continue to undermine sustainable development. Reducing the impacts of natural hazards and identifying pathways towards resilient societies hence remains a global priority. Understanding and assessing the drivers, patterns and dynamics of risk...

Kritische Infrastrukturen (KRITIS) sind aufgrund ihrer Versorgungsleistung mit kritischen Dienstleistungen und Gütern für das Funktionieren der Gesellschaft grundlegend. Die starke Abhängigkeit von KRITIS-Leistungen und die hohe Anfälligkeit von KRITIS gegenüber einer Vielzahl von Gefahren (z. B. Naturgefahren, Terroranschlag) macht ihren Schutz zu...

Flood damage assessment is crucial to address the challenges of climate and socioeconomic changes. Researchers and practitioners have developed several damage models to tackle local and regional situations. Particularly for direct damages to the residential sector, these models rely on numerous hypothesis (e.g. zero damage threshold) and parameters...

Over the past decades, floods have caused significant financial losses in Turkey, amounting to US$ 800 million between 1960 and 2014. With the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (SFDRR), it is aimed to reduce the direct economic loss from disasters in relation to the global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. Accordingly, a me...

Several severe flood events hit Germany in recent years, with events in 2013 and 2016 being the most destructive ones although dynamics and flood processes were very different. While the 2013-event was a slowly rising widespread fluvial flood accompanied by some severe dike breaches, the events in 2016 were fast onset pluvial floods, which resulted...

Integrated flood management strategies consider property-level precautionary measures as a vital part. Whereas this is a well-researched topic for residents, little is known about the adaptive behaviour of flood-prone companies although they often settle on the ground floor of buildings and are thus among the first affected by flooding. This pilot...

Model predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly use physical metrics like inundation depth or building characteristics but largely ignore indicators of preparedness. The role of such predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German flood-affecte...

Social inequalities lead to flood resilience inequalities across social groups, a topic that requires improved documentation and understanding. The objective of this paper is to attend to these differences by investigating self-stated flood recovery across genders in Vietnam as a conceptual replication of earlier results from Germany. This study em...