Landslide disaster risk awareness in Mexico: community access to mapping at local scale

Abstract

Recent investigations have sought to understand the spatial-temporal distribution of landslides in Teziutlan, Puebla, a municipality historically affected by landslides. The latest initiative, under the umbrella of the ICL-IPL Project “Landslide disaster risk communication in mountain areas,” was the publication of a book of Atlas type comprising a collection of 142 maps and their corresponding explanatory texts that included a context analysis of landslide disaster risk drivers at various scales, from regional to local. This paper aims to recognise and address the necessity to further enhance the guiding principle of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction to focus on the understanding of disaster risk drivers at local level, for the determination of measures to reduce disaster risk. We present an initial contribution to promote landslide disaster risk awareness in the urban area of Teziutlan by providing to the community direct access to maps of landslide disaster risk at local scale; this is a first step towards the establishment of a robust strategy to communicate landslide risk in the long term. Effective implementation calls for decreasing vulnerability and exposure. Beyond contexts of vulnerability reflected by social, economic, cultural, political, and institutional conditions, it may be difficult to picture the spatial interactions of exposure of communities, assets, and the environment because the means of analysing spatial relationships between society and nature are not commonly available in mountain areas. Therefore, for people to better understand risk, maps of landslide susceptibility and risk exposure present a good way for the inhabitants to familiarise themselves with the spatial context of the dynamics in which they are immersed.