The SafeLand project; Impacts of global change on landslide hazard and risk in Europe in 21st century

SafeLand is a Large-scale integrating Collaborative research project funded by the FP7 of the European Commission. Identification of landslide hazard and risk hotspots was one of the major tasks in the beginning of the project. For that purpose three different models were developed, all of them using the same input data for entire Europe. Common for the three models was the identification of Italy as the country with the highest exposure to landslide risk. However, the small alpine countries had the highest relative exposure compared to their total land area and population. Overall, 4 to 7 million people in Europe, as well as significant amount of infrastructure are exposed to landslide threat. In the expectation of a changing climate, the question arises on how the level and spatial pattern of landslide hazard and risk in Europe will develop in the 21st century. To answer this question, several factors must be considered. Not only will the climate change in the next 90 years, but also the demography and land cover in Europe will change significantly. The main objective of the present study was therefore to quantify the landslide hazard and risk in Europe now and in the future and see if there will be significant changes. Changing precipitation pattern, land cover and population were used as input to assess the landslide hazard and risk in the years 2030, 2050, 2070 and 2090. The results were then compared to the present situation in 2010. The effect of climate change varies depending on the type of landslide. In this study the focus was on precipitation-induced landslides, which are a direct consequence of the extreme precipitation events and therefore closely coupled to a change in the frequency of extreme events. The study showed that climate change and changes in land cover will only cause minor variations in landslide hazard. The risk associated with landslides, however, is expected to change significantly due to changing patterns of population in Europe.JRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen