A new landslide susceptibility map for Central Asia

From the perspective of landslides, Central Asia is a fascinating area of the world.  The combination of areas of steep topography and high elevations; frequent, intense earthquakes; and areas of high, seasonal rainfall mean that landslides are frequent.  In parts of Central Asia the population has high levels of vulnerability too.  However, this is not an area that is intensely covered by western media, and the amount of research that has been undertaken here is also low, meaning that global awareness of landslides in this region is lower than is the case elsewhere.

But, what cannot be denied is there are some spectacular landslides in Central Asia.  For example, back in 2020 I described the Imom rockslide; there are many more events of this type.

In this context, it is very welcome to see the publication in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences of a new article (Rosi et al. 2023) that provides a new landslide susceptibility map for Central Asia.  This is a really good piece of work drawing upon multiple strands of evidence, and correlating the outcome with a database of recorded landslides.  This is the resultant map:-

The landslide susceptibility map of Rosi et al. (2023) for Central Asia. The source of the base map is Esri, USGS, NOAA.

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As the map shows, the southeast corner of the map is most heavily affected by landslides.  Rosi et al. (2023) provides a higher resolution map of this area – the black dots are mapped landslides:-

The landslide susceptibility map of Rosi et al. (2023) for a part of Central Asia. The source of the base map is Esri, USGS, NOAA.

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The map was developed as part of a World Bank funded project.  The information it contains should be useful for land use planning and for disaster prevention.

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Reference

Rosi, A., Frodella, W., Nocentini, N., Caleca, F., Havenith, H. B., Strom, A., Saidov, M., Bimurzaev, G. A., and Tofani, V. 2023. Comprehensive landslide susceptibility map of Central Asia. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 23, 2229–2250, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-23-2229-2023.