A brief summary of the LANDSLIP project goals

Landslide Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment, Preparedness and Early Warning in South Asia Integrating Meteorology, Landscape and Society (LANDSLIP) has been funded under the UK NERC/DFID SHEAR (Science for Humanitarian Emergencies & Resilience) programme.

SHEAR aims to support improved disaster resilience and humanitarian response by advancing monitoring, assessment and prediction of natural hazards and risks across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and through working with users, bringing this into use to reduce the impacts of disasters.

Through advances in interdisciplinary science and application, the ambition LANDSLIP is to contribute to better landslide risk assessment and early warning in a multi-hazard framework, and, by working with communities, better preparedness for hydrologically controlled landslides and related hazards on a slope to regional spatial scale, and daily to seasonal temporal scale.

LANDSLIP will operate in partnership with decision makers in public and private sectors, academics and not-for-profit agencies to achieve an overarching aim of contributing to better landslide risk assessment and early warning in a multi-hazard framework in India, aiming to increase resilience and reduce loss.

LANDSLIP will develop new insights by building on existing scientific research in India, the UK and Italy, using interdisciplinary methodologies and perspectives. Due to complex environmental conditions and triggering processes that cause landslides, the extent and variability of spatial and temporal scales mean that landslides are inherently difficult to forecast and manage at site, slope, catchment and regional spatial scales, and hourly to decadal temporal scales. LANDSLIP will address this by doing research to understand the weather regimes (previously not done in South Asia) and rainfall characteristics that trigger landslides and geomorphological/geological control factors that can enhance landslide susceptibility. Knowledge of where and when historic landslides have occurred and under what environmental conditions will also be collated and analysed, drawing on extensive consortium experience of developing and managing landslide inventories and impact libraries.

LANDSLIP is expected to improve landslide early warning system (EWS) effectiveness through integrating social-dynamic information gathered from both “human” (i.e. social media) and “physical” sensors (remote sensing and pre-existing, site-specific wireless networks). LANDSLIP will develop ways of utilising these sources of information to supplement existing inventories and enhance EWS information for decision makers.

For more information: LANDSLIP@irpi.cnr.it