Approaches for promoting landslide early warming in a changing climate scenario

Abstract

Asian countries such as Thailand, Nepal, India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka are often affected by rain-induced landslide events. As a result they have already endorsed the concept of integrating landslide risk management into their mountain development plans and have advocated for many risk management interventions including community-based activities in landslide prone areas. Several governments have designated a set of institutions with a mandate for landslide risk management. They recognize the importance of structural interventions for stabilization of potentially unstable slopes, landslide monitoring, early warning, capacity building and awareness creation as essential tasks for reducing the socio-economic impacts as well as for improving the community preparedness to save lives. Most developing countries in Asia consider structural interventions for stabilization of potentially unstable slopes as a difficult and a costly measure which cannot be implemented widely. As an alternativemeasure early warning becomes an acceptable solution which is more cost effective, practical and widely implementable as a risk reduction measure. More importantly it can be effectively used in areas where the degree of susceptibility and hazard have been delineated in advance through mapping and hazard assessment interventions. However there are difficulties associated with defining the threshold limits, continuous monitoring, developing decision support tools for community action and so on. Since communities at risk need to take speedy actions as soon as they see the symptoms of landslide trigger or in an event of reaching the precipitation threshold limits. Therefore it is necessary to establish community-based initiatives combining science and practice in an effective way. Landslide professionals and practitioners working in mandated institutions require continuous facilitation, exposure, guidance and technical support to intensify such landslide risk management interventions. It is also necessary for having forums to discuss challenges and difficulties and to share the lessons learned in implementing landslide risk reduction projects including community-level initiatives. They also wish to involve other institutions such as local government authorities, non-governmental organizations and the private sector to obtain support for their activities through creating more awareness on the process and operational aspects including landslide monitoring and early warning.