Wealth and land-cover change govern landslide fatalities on world’s mountains

Abstract

Despite the common perception, most fatal landslides occur in human-transformed environments. Even on steep terrain, anthropogenic disturbances may fundamentally modulate landslides. Most of our knowledge regarding landslide-human interaction is restricted to local models or regional heuristic assessments based on empirical evidence. In this study, we used land-use–land-cover change as a metric to explain human pressure as a preconditioning factor for fatal landslide occurrences to provide a global overview. We addressed countries’ income levels, populations, exposure, and a dataset of ≈60 years of land-use–land-cover changes with mountainous landmasses to compare landslides and fatalities across 46 countries. Our statistical analyses show that land-use–land-cover changes have a substantially greater influence on the density of fatal landslides and landslide fatalities than physical factors such as topography and precipitation, especially in lower-income countries. We observed a marginal landslide impact when the land-use–land-cover change was low, regardless of the income class. Our results emphasize that effective land-use–land-cover planning is critical to decreasing landslide fatalities, especially in low- and lower-middle–income countries.