Assessment of global landslide hazard hotspots

Abstract

In the Natural Disaster Hotspots project, Nadim et al. (2006) developed a model to identify the global distribution of landslide hazard and risk. The model was based on the global datasets of climate, lithology, earthquake activity, and topography; and it was used to identify the areas with the highest hazard, or hotspots. The landslide hazard assessment model developed in the Natural Disaster Hotspots project was modified and improved to provide a better basis for making predictions of the global risk associated with landslides in the Global Risk Update (GRU) study of UNISDR (UNISDR 2009). This paper describes the updated model for global landslide hazard assessment. The major triggering factors for landslides are extreme precipitation events, strong earthquakes, and human activity. Precipitation-induced landslide hazard and earthquake-induced landslide hazard are assessed independently in the update model. Landslides induced by human activity are not addressed in this paper. The updating of the model was done by the landslide research team at the ICL World Centre of Excellence, the International Centre for Geohazards (ICG) in Oslo, Norway, and the work is designated as project C102 in the International Programme for Landslides (IPL).