In recent years, the intensity and frequency of natural hazards such as landslides, mudslides and mudslides have increased significantly due to climate change and global warming. These catastrophic events are responsible for numerous destructions of infrastructures with high economic losses and, even worse, often claim human lives. Therefore, in addition to the prediction, the design and installation of protective structures are of tremendous importance. Due to its hybrid approach of an Eulerian background grid in combination with Lagrangian moving material points, the Material Point Method (MPM) is particularly suited to capture the flow process of those mass movement hazards. For the numerical simulation of protective structures however, other numerical methods are often preferable. Considering highly flexible structures which are often utilized due to their high energy absorption capacity classical Finite Element Method (FEM) are best suited to model cable, beam and membrane elements, while a retaining wall consisting of few discrete blocks may preferable modelled by Discrete Element Method (DEM). Therefore, we are proposing partitioned coupling approaches to combine the advantages of different numerical methods, so that the protective structures can be appropriately designed to withstand the impact of those mass movement hazards. The talk will present the recent advances of the partitioned strategies to couple MPM with either DEM or FEM. Furthermore, the latest achievements of robust imposition of non-conforming boundary conditions within the MPM formulation are presented which are crucial for the partitioned coupling algorithm.