Economic Losses for Rural Land Value Due to Landslides

Veronica Zumpano,Carmen M. Rosskopf,Žiga Malek,Mihai Micu,Mario Parise,Dan Balteanu,Pietro P. C. Aucelli,Luca Pisano

doi:10.3389/feart.2018.00097

Abstract

A high dynamic environment is typically interested by changes affecting the natural processes and their related consequences. Landslides do not only alter the landscape, but substantially affect human activities. When it comes to natural hazards, landslides have been acknowledged as one of the main causes of human casualties or damage to assets. Furthermore, economic losses to rural lands are also significant, despite often being underestimated, especially in rural areas. In territories not densely populated, the main productive activities are in fact often based on the agricultural and pastoral resources. We intend to propose a methodology that helps to investigate the potential loss of value (expressed in EUR) of lands usually exploited for economic profit in rural areas. We test the method on two case studies, belonging to different European Countries with very different economical assets and geological, geomorphological and other environmental conditions. The first study area is situated in the Southern Italian Apennines, in the Molise region, while the second area is located in Buzau County, a region belonging to the Romanian Curvature Carpathians and Subcarpathians Our analysis is focused not only on the actual situation, represented by the past and present landslides, but also on potential future scenarios for 2050. The scenarios foresee future similar socio-economical and technological activities, with no major changes expected. The loss estimation is based on the presence of landslides affecting the rural lands, but it also considers both a present and future landslide susceptibility scenario. This procedure allowed the estimation of the economic losses in the two case-study areas, highlighting how the same natural processes might result in different economic consequences. Following our approach, the results highlight that for the Italian case study there is a loss of 10,45% for 2007 and 9,90% for 2050 of the total land value as concerns landslides susceptibility. In the Romanian case study, on the other hand, the loss corresponds to 29,60% and 29,81% for 2010 and 2050, respectively. In addition, the proposed procedure could be considered a valuable methodological approach to assess landslide-induced economic losses, and be effectively used during spatial planning activities, aimed at supporting decision

Highlights

To quantify the changes in the economic values for the land cover categories considered relevant for the rural economic activity of the study areas, we started to evaluate the variations in the total land value exclusively due to land cover changes for the period 2007–2050 in the Rivo catchment, and 2010–2050 for Balaneasa; afterwards, we present the results obtained for the estimated loss due to susceptibility for the past situation and for the future 2050 scenario
In this work we have introduced a semi-quantitative approach applicable at the regional scale to estimate the loss of value suffered by rural lands and, in a local way and to a lesser degree, by agricultural lands due to landslide susceptibility
We produced two sets of landslide susceptibility maps related to two time frames (2007/2010 and 2050), in order to evaluate possible values changes and trends related to land cover variations

Summary

Introduction

Natural hazards, including landslides, cause severe damage to a large variety of assets (meaning structural, infrastructural, and social goods), determining losses on population activities, natural, and human environment all over the world (Zêzere et al, 2008; Petley, 2012; Promper and Glade, 2016; Salvati et al, 2018).There is an increasing interest on studying how anthropogenic pressure on the ecosystems can determine changes in the spatial distribution of landslides (Reichenbach et al, 2014; Malek et al, 2015; Schmaltz et al, 2017; Gariano et al, 2018). Natural hazards, including landslides, cause severe damage to a large variety of assets (meaning structural, infrastructural, and social goods), determining losses on population activities, natural, and human environment all over the world (Zêzere et al, 2008; Petley, 2012; Promper and Glade, 2016; Salvati et al, 2018). It is important to underline that changes in the socio-economical structure are going to affect the number and the type of assets exposed to natural hazards and risks, including landslides (Pisano et al, 2017a). When dealing with natural disasters, direct and indirect losses have to be distinguished. According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR): “Direct losses refer to damage to human lives, buildings, infrastructure, and natural resources. The damage observed, and the related costs, may be very different to quantify depending upon the type of natural hazards (Parise et al, 2013; Vennari et al, 2015, 2016; Salvati et al, 2018)

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