The spatial relationship between landslide and land use activities in Langat River Basin: A case study

Abstract

Landslide is a natural hazard that occurs all over the world and can cause enormous damage to the environment and human life. The developing countries are not spared from dealing with the issue of landslides where land use activities are recognised as one of the most triggering factors of landslide occurrences. In this study, investigation on spatial relationship was performed between landslide occurrences and land use activities at Langat River Basin. Landslide spatial distribution was determined using land use activities for the year 2021. The land use map was generated using supervised classification by Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach. In addition, the accuracy assessment was applied using Kappa coefficient to validate the land use classification. A total of 70 historical landslide points was used to analyse the spatial relationship between landslide and land use activities. Based on the results, land use category at Langat River Basin was dominated by agriculture with 59.65%. The overall accuracy for land use classification was 90.81% and kappa coefficient was 0.88. Meanwhile, the spatial relationship between landslide occurrence and land use activities was higher in the built-up area with 48.57%. The growing population and economic sector in Langat River Basin were found to be contributing to the increase in built-up areas. Thus, these results are particularly useful in understanding the spatial relationship between landslide occurrence and land use activities where the development area is more vulnerable to facing landslide disasters. These findings will also help the government to achieve the agenda for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2030 as highlighted to mitigate the risk of natural disasters.