Prediction of Landslide Susceptibility in the Karakorum under the Context of Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change has recently increased the frequency of landslides in alpine areas. Susceptibility mapping is crucial for anticipating and assessing landslide risk. However, traditional methods focus on static environmental variables to emphasize the spatial distribution of landslides, ignoring temporal dynamics in landslide development in the context of climate change. In this work, we focused on static and dynamic environment factors and utilized the certainty factor-logistic regression (CF-LR) model to assess and predict landslide susceptibility in Taxkorgan County, located in the Karakorum. The assessment and prediction were based on a catalog of climate change-related landslides over the past 20 years, the causative factors, and predicted climatic variables for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP1-2.6) scenario. The results indicated that elevation, slope, groundwater, slope length gradient (LS) factor, Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), valley depth, and maximum precipitation were the key causes of slides below the snow line. The key factors causing debris flow above the snow line were elevation, slope, topographic relief, aspect, LS factor, distance to the river, and maximum temperature. The accuracy of slide and debris flow susceptibility was 0.92 and 0.89, respectively. The area of slides with medium, high, and very high susceptibility is 25.5% of the Taxkorgan. In addition, 82.6% of the slides happened in this region, and 49.5% of the entire area is covered by debris flows with medium, high, and very high susceptibility. Moreover, this area accounts for 91.8% of all debris flows. Until 2060, the region’s climate is anticipated to become warmer and wetter. Slides below the snow line will gradually decrease and shift eastward, and debris flows above the snow line will expand. Our findings will contribute to the management of landslide risks at the regional scale.