Abstract
Fans and cones are the results of recurring geomorphic processes and they mark preferred areas for settlements and other forms of land use. Due to their position below larger slopes and valleys, processes like landslides, rock falls, debris flows and snow avalanches often endanger people, buildings and infrastructure. In the past centuries and decades, damage causing natural hazard events initiated the construction of structural mitigation measures like snow supporting structures against avalanches or check dams to reduce erosion in torrents. The goal of these efforts was to reduce the probability of damage causing events – decisions were primarily hazard-based. In the last 10 years the damage potential was increasingly taken into account, which led to risk-based decisions. The fundamental basis for both approaches is a solid knowledge of the event history allowing to derive realistic scenarios of potential future events (Jakob 2012, Chap. 6). Since the frequency and magnitude of these scenarios have a large impact on the calculated risk, dating of past events are of pivotal interest for risk analyses.
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Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges contributions by and/or discussions with Walter Ammann, Nicole Bischof, Sven Fuchs, Peter Gutwein, Bernhard Krummenacher, Hans Merz, Christoph Rheinberger, Jakob Rhyner, Hans Romang, Yvonne Schaub, Thomas Schneider, Christian Wilhelm, and Cornelia Winkler during the past years which all contributed in one way or another to the thoughts presented in this chapter.
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Bründl, M. (2013). Dealing with Natural Hazard Risks in Switzerland – The Influence of Hazard Mapping on Risk-Based Decision Making. In: Schneuwly-Bollschweiler, M., Stoffel, M., Rudolf-Miklau, F. (eds) Dating Torrential Processes on Fans and Cones. Advances in Global Change Research, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4336-6_24
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