Plenary: Progress of living with landslide risk in Europe
Original version
In K. Sassa, P. Canuti, & Y. Yin (Eds.), Landslide Science for a Safer Geoenvironment: Vol.1: The International Programme on Landslides (IPL) (pp. 3-20). Cham: Springer International Publishing.Abstract
The need to protect people and property with a changing pattern of landslide hazard and risk caused by climate change and changes in demography, and the reality for societies in Europe to live with the risk associated with natural hazards, were the motives for the research project “SafeLand” on landslide risk in Europe.
One of the main aims of the SafeLand project was to produce practical tools and guidelines for stakeholders and end-users of various backgrounds. These products are a mixture of state-of-the-art practices and the results of new and innovative research. The main achievements and products of SafeLand were:
Various guidelines related to landslide triggering processes and run-out modelling.
Development and testing of several empirical methods for predicting the characteristics of threshold rainfall events for triggering of precipitation-induced landslides, and development of an empirical model for assessing the changes in landslide frequency (hazard) as a function of changes in the demography and population density.
Guidelines for landslide susceptibility, hazard and risk assessment and zoning.
New methodologies for physical and societal vulnerability assessment for different categories of elements at risk.
Identification of landslide hazard and risk hotspots for Europe.
Different regional and local climate model simulations over selected regions of Europe at spatial resolutions of 10 × 10 km and 3.8 × 3.8 km.
Guidelines for use of remote sensing techniques, monitoring and early warning systems.
Development of a prototype web-based “toolbox” of innovative and technically appropriate prevention and mitigation measures.
Case histories of well-documented landslides.
Research on stakeholder workshops and participatory processes to involve the population exposed to landslide risk in the decision-making process for choosing the most appropriate risk mitigation measure(s).
Estimates of changes in landslide hazard and spatial distribution of population at risk in Europe due to climate change, changes in land use, and demographic changes in the twenty-first century.
The results of the SafeLand project have provided educators, researchers, stakeholders and authorities with state-of-the-art knowledge and improved access to a landslide risk management system for increased safety and cost-effectiveness. The SafeLand project deliverables are expected to help provide the basis for future European directives in relation to natural hazards. All the deliverables of the SafeLand project can be downloaded from the project web site http://safeland-fp7.eu