Past Natech accidents highlighted the vulnerability of these industrial activities to natural-hazard impacts with consequences ranging from health impacts and environmental degradation to significant economic losses at local or regional level from asset damage and the associated business downtime. For major accidents, ripple effects on the economy can reach global proportions, resulting in a shortage of raw materials or intermediate products in the manufacturing industry, and causing global price hikes. Some of these accidents have also drawn attention to the increased risk of cascading effects during natural disasters and the challenges faced by emergency responders in combating accident consequences when lifelines have been downed by the natural event.

Unfortunately, Natech risk is bound to increase in the future. On the one hand, climate change is already affecting the severity and frequency of hydro-meteorological hazards, such as floods, heavy precipitation, or storms, while worldwide industrialization increases the number of technological hazards. On the other hand, human exposure and vulnerability is also growing with a trend toward increasing urbanization, and industry and community encroachment on areas that are natural-hazard prone.

Awareness of Natech risks is increasing and first attempts at systematically assessing and controlling this kind of risk are being made. However, the move toward a safer and more resilient society relies on the closing of a number of remaining research and policy gaps related to Natech risk reduction which require the attention of regulatory bodies, industry, and the research community.

Further awareness-raising efforts are needed to help stakeholders recognize the vulnerability of hazardous installations with respect to natural-hazard impact. This includes the recognition that vulnerabilities may also be tied to the nonavailability of protection measures, and of internal or external lifelines, which are also prone to damage or failure during natural hazards. In this context it is important to note that interdependences between lifelines are not routinely assessed.

Considering the distribution of knowledge and competences across different actors, for example, industry, ministries in charge of civil protection, environment, or labor, it should be ensured that communication pertaining to Natech risks flows freely and effectively between these actors. Otherwise there is the danger of underestimating Natech risks with repercussions on safety legislation, technical standards and codes, and risk mitigation. Risk communication should therefore be improved in industry, and at all levels of government, be it national, regional, or local.

In some countries and for some industrial activities, current legislative frameworks explicitly address the risk of natural-hazard impacts on hazardous installations and can—in principle—provide a significant contribution to industrial safety. It is, however, crucial that competent authorities ensure the enforcement of these regulations for them to be effective in reducing Natech risks. Guidance on how to achieve the goals set out in the legislative framework should be developed to help industry comply with the legal requirements and to support authorities in evaluating if industry has met the associated safety objectives. Where missing, specific legislation for Natech risk reduction should be developed and implemented. Experience shows that in most situations risk mitigation worked best if required by law.

Risk assessment helps the operator to identify safety gaps in a hazardous installation and the associated risk-reduction priorities. For Natech risk assessment, no consolidated methodologies exist. Research should therefore focus with a priority on the development of methodologies and tools for Natech risk assessment and related guidance for industry. The accident scenarios identified in the risk assessment also support land-use- and emergency-planning decisions. In addition, an inventory of best practices for Natech risk reduction for different types of natural hazards should be developed and disseminated widely to combat the fragmentation of information potentially useful to all stakeholders.

In the assessment of Natech risks the impacts of climate change on natural-hazard severities and frequencies should be considered and appropriate action taken where additional vulnerabilities are identified. The adequacy of the design basis of hazardous installations and equipment against natural-hazard loading should be scrutinized in particular in light of climate change. This also includes an assessment of the adequacy of the protection measures in place. Natural-hazard maps that are kept updated and which include climate-change predictions can be helpful in addressing this problem.

Data availability is the bottleneck in Natech risk reduction. Only little data are available to researchers for learning lessons on the dynamics of Natech accidents and the effectiveness of prevention and mitigation measures. On the one hand, there is a tendency among the operators of hazardous installations to not voluntarily disclose information about near misses or accidents for fear of negative repercussions on their activity. Frequently, even company-internal documentation of accidents is missing. On the other hand, where reporting requirements exist, they usually apply only to those accidents whose consequences exceed a predefined severity threshold. These two factors have caused a lot of precious data to be lost which translates into a missed opportunity to learn lessons from which the whole industrial-safety community could have benefitted. Consequently, the sharing of company data on Natech accidents and near misses should be promoted and facilitated by authorities. For effective information sharing to take place, industry might need assurances that the data will be used for future accident prevention and mitigation rather than to assign blame. Where required, accident data can be anonymized. It would also be an important step forward to separate the reporting criteria from consequence severity to ensure that also low-impact accidents or near misses are captured. These events have often proven to be equally important from a lesson-learning perspective.

With Natech risk reduction cutting across several disciplines, different stakeholder groups need to be trained to ascertain that they have the adequate knowledge and skills to carry out their tasks in situations that deviate from the normal operating conditions they have been trained for, e.g., in case of natural-hazard impacts, and to properly handle the possible complications that frequently arise during Natech accidents. These groups comprise not only personnel employed at hazardous installations, but also authorities in charge of chemical-accident prevention and civil protection.

Closure of the aforementioned gaps will require close collaboration between scientists, engineers, operators, and policy makers in an interdisciplinary effort to address Natech risk reduction in a comprehensive way that is as cost-effective as possible. Public–private partnerships could play an important role in linking science, practice, and policy and should be explored in this context.

The many Natech accidents in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 took the world by surprise, in particular because they happened in a country with high levels of preparedness and advanced emergency-response capacities. The situation is even more challenging in the developing world where basic industrial-safety knowledge is often lacking and which is therefore ill-equipped to address Natech risks effectively. The outlook is, however, promising as awareness of Natech risks has grown worldwide post-Tohoku, and scientists have started to join forces with industry and government in an effort to tackle the issue. As devastating as it was, by drawing the world’s attention to important gaps in accident risk management, the Japan disaster has created an opportunity to make the world a safer place.