Abstract
Abstract. Landslides are a ubiquitous hazard in terrestrial environments with slopes, incurring human fatalities in urban settlements, along transport corridors and at sites of rural industry. Assessment of landslide risk requires high-quality landslide databases. Recently, global landslide databases have shown the extent to which landslides impact on society and identified areas most at risk. Previous global analysis has focused on rainfall-triggered landslides over short ∼ 5-year observation periods. This paper presents spatiotemporal analysis of a global dataset of fatal non-seismic landslides, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2016. The data show that in total 55 997 people were killed in 4862 distinct landslide events. The spatial distribution of landslides is heterogeneous, with Asia representing the dominant geographical area. There are high levels of interannual variation in the occurrence of landslides. Although more active years coincide with recognised patterns of regional rainfall driven by climate anomalies, climate modes (such as El Niño–Southern Oscillation) cannot yet be related to landsliding, requiring a landslide dataset of 30+ years. Our analysis demonstrates that landslide occurrence triggered by human activity is increasing, in particular in relation to construction, illegal mining and hill cutting. This supports notions that human disturbance may be more detrimental to future landslide incidence than climate.
Highlights
Landslides are ubiquitous in any terrestrial environment with slopes, driven by tectonic (e.g. Bennett et al, 2016), climatic (e.g. Moreiras, 2005) and/or human (Petley et al, 2007) activities
Interest in quantifying landslide risk has developed since the attempt by the International Association of Engineering Geology (IAEG) Commission on Landslides to compile a list of worldwide landslide events for the UNESCO annual summary of information on natural disasters in 1971 (UNESCO, 1973)
The autocorrelation of the nonseismic non-rainfall triggered” (NSNR) landslides pentad series (Fig. S2) does not contain this pattern and the correlation coefficients are generally weak. This indicates that there is no seasonal pattern in the NSNR landslide series, which is to be expected in events that are not triggered by meteorological processes
Summary
Landslides are ubiquitous in any terrestrial environment with slopes, driven by tectonic (e.g. Bennett et al, 2016), climatic (e.g. Moreiras, 2005) and/or human (Petley et al, 2007) activities. Relative to other natural disasters, the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) suggests that landslides account for 4.9 % of all natural disaster events and 1.3 % of all natural hazard fatalities between 1990 and 2015; 54 % of these landslide events occurred in Asia (Guha-Sapir et al, 2018). Past studies on global landslide distribution have focused on rainfall-triggered events, recognising the importance of rainfall and climate in inhabited regions with steep slopes (Dowling and Santi, 2014; Kirschbaum et al, 2012, 2015). This paper provides a key update on the impact of landslides worldwide, extending Petley (2012) to include landslides from 2004 to 2016, the study considers trends in landslides triggered by human activity, thereby adding to the discussion on climate versus human disturbance as current and future drivers of landslide incidence (Crozier, 2010)
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