Human Vulnerability to Landslides

Abstract

Landslides pose a devastating threat to human health, killing thousands of people annually. Human vulnerability is a crucial element of landslide risk reduction, yet up until now, all methods for estimating the human consequences of landslides rely on subjective, expert judgment. Furthermore, these methods do not explore the underlying causes of mortality or inform strategies to reduce landslide risk. In light of these issues, we develop a data-driven tool to estimate an individual's probability of death based on landslide intensity, which can be used directly in landslide risk assessment. We find that between inundation depths of approximately 1-6 m, human behavior is the primary driver of mortality. Landslide vulnerability is strongly correlated with the economic development of a region, but landslide losses are not stratified by gender and age to the degree of other natural hazards. We observe that relatively simple actions, such as moving to an upper floor or a prepared refuge space, increase the odds of survival by up to a factor of 12. Additionally, community-scale hazard awareness programs and training for citizen first responders offer a potent means to maximize survival rates in landslides. 2.2. Vulnerability Vulnerability is the potential to suffer harm from a human perspective. The natural sciences focus on physical vulnerability, which quantitatively describes the degree or probability of tangible damage, injuries, or deaths on a scale from zero (none) to one (complete). Physical vulnerability is a fundamental component of risk analysis (Fell et al., 2005). A recent emphasis on vulnerability-rather than hazard-as the primary driver

Evaluating landslide response in seismic and rainfall regime: A case study from the SE Carpathians, Romania

“…Landslides, though a normal process of hillslope erosion, pose socio-economic risk to human life and infrastructure (Froude and Petley 2018;Pollock and Wartman 2020;Kumar et al 2021). Despite the rising global landslide mortality risk, effective evaluation of disastrous influences of landslides has been infrequent (Sassa 2015;Haque et al 2019;Klimes et al 2019).…”

Quantifying the Effect of Precipitation on Landslide Hazard in Urbanized and Non‐Urbanized Areas

“…Given that over half the world's population lives in cities—and that this percentage is expected to increase in the coming decades (United Nations Population Division, 2018)—the potential for urbanized areas to promote precipitation‐triggered landslides has a number of implications for human health and safety (e.g., landslide mortality; Pollock & Wartman, 2020), infrastructure damage and loss (e.g., progressive building failure; Cui et al., 2019; Luo et al., 2019), and disturbances to urban systems (e.g., traffic delays; Postance et al., 2017) that can extend beyond the context of a specific landslide location (e.g., Kasmalkar et al., 2020). Enhanced understanding of the effect of precipitation on urban landslides may inform adaptation efforts.…”

Risk Assessment of Population Loss Posed by Earthquake-Landslide-Debris Flow Disaster Chain: A Case Study in Wenchuan, China

“…The population's vulnerabilities to earthquakes, landslides, and debris flows have mainly been studied using surface, curve, matrix, and coefficient in existing studies [51][52][53][88][89][90]. The determination of the vulnerability to earthquakes mostly uses an empirical formula that considers the epicentral intensity and the entire population affected while there is difficulty converting between the epicentral intensity and the earthquake intensity [11,51].…”

“…The determination of the vulnerability to earthquakes mostly uses an empirical formula that considers the epicentral intensity and the entire population affected while there is difficulty converting between the epicentral intensity and the earthquake intensity [11,51]. The determination of the vulnerability to landslides usually involves using key factors such as the hazard, depth, and impact pressure to construct a mortality curve [31,88]. The vulnerability to debris flows is based on the parameters at the administrative unit scale based on parameters such as the age structure of the population.…”