{"id":2539,"date":"2011-01-24T07:53:41","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T07:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=2539"},"modified":"2011-01-24T07:54:24","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T07:54:24","slug":"trends-in-landslide-impacts-in-asia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2011\/01\/24\/trends-in-landslide-impacts-in-asia\/","title":{"rendered":"Trends in landslide impacts in Asia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend I was putting together some data on trends in landslide occurrence over the last few years for a UN Forestry report.\u00a0 This is based on the data that I have been collecting over the last eight years or so on landslides that kill people.\u00a0 I looked first at the number of deaths non-seismic landslides – this graph shows the reported number of people killed per year from 2003 to 2010.\u00a0 Note though that the 2010 data is incomplete, such that the values\u00a0reported here for that year are an under-estimate:<\/p>\n

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You’ll see that the data suggests no overall trend in reported losses over this period.\u00a0 The data is very noisy (i.e.\u00a0there is a huge amount of variation from year to year).\u00a0 You will notice that in this data 2006 stands out as being exceptional – this is dominated by the effects of the Guinsuago landslide in the Philippines (which killed\u00a0about 1,100 people); the Mount Mayon lahars (also in the Philippines), which killed about \u00a01300 people; and the landsfall of typhoon Bilis in China and Vietnam.\u00a0 Interestingly 2006 was an El Nino year.\u00a0 In 2010 there was another large peak; 2010 was again an El Nino year.\u00a0 This is of course not enough to show that El Nino was responsible for these peaks, but of course there are good reasons why this might be the case.\u00a0 It is also interesting to note though that in 2006 the big spike was in SE. Asia, whereas in 2010 this was in E. Asia.<\/p>\n

The numbers of recorded fatality-inducing landslides shows a rather different trend:<\/p>\n

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The overall trends are all upwards, markedly so S. Asia.\u00a0 There is no apparent\u00a0influence of the El Nino – La Nina cycle here.\u00a0 Of course it may be that my abilities to collect data are improving, giving an apparent upward trend, but I don’t think that this is all of the picture here (I have looked in some detail at the magnitude – frequency relationships of this data, which suggest that the trend is real).\u00a0 Thus, the number of landslides that kill people does seem to be increasing with time in Asia; the key questions that arise are why\u00a0and how we can effectively act to reduce this trend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a great deal of discussion in the landslide community as to whether trends in landslide occurrence are upwards. Data from the Interb=national Landslide Centre database for the last seven years are used to show that the number of landslides that kill people in Asia appears to be increasing, whilst the number of people killled shows a far less clear trend, but may be dominated by the effects of El Nino events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":2544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[519,45,469,959],"class_list":["post-2539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-asia","tag-database","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}