Background

In India, as in many other areas in Asia and in the world, landslides are abundant and frequent, and they represent a serious hazard to the local population. The aim of LANDSLIP is to develop tools, including operational systems, to contribute to reducing impacts of hydrologically related landslide multi-hazards and to building resilience to landslides in vulnerable and hazard-prone areas of India.

Purpose

LANDSLIP intends to contribute to better landslide multi-hazard risk assessment, operational early-warning and working with communities for better preparedness, for hydrologically controlled landslide and related hazards, on a regional to catchment spatial scale and a seasonal to daily temporal scale, in India.

Methods

In LANDSLIP, we will use methods and tools originally designed and tested in Italy, for the definition of empirical thresholds for rainfall-induced landslides in selected areas in India, and for their implementation in regional operational forecasting systems. We will also experiment the use of satellite products for the estimation of the amount of rainfall that can trigger landslides, and for the production of landslide inventory maps which we will use to validate the landslide predictions.

Results

We expect to collect sufficient rainfall and landslide information to establish reliable empirical rainfall thresholds for possible landslide occurrence in different areas in India, and to implement the empirical thresholds in two regional-scale, operational landslide early warning systems in two areas in India, and in particular in the Darjeeling area, East Sikkim, e in the Nilgiris area, Western Ghats. We expect that the results obtained in these two areas will be useful in other areas in India, and more generally in other areas of South-East Asia.

Products

Our contribution to the project concerns the definition of empirical rainfall thresholds for the possible occurrence of landslides, and the implementation of the empirical thresholds in regional, operational landslide early warning systems in two areas in India.

Conclusions

LANDSLIP intends to develop tools, including operational systems, to reduce the impacts of landslides induced by rainfall, and to increase the resilience of local communities to landslides in India. For this purpose, LANDSLIP provides for the active involvement of local players who will contribute to the design, the implementation and to operate the forecasting systems developed under the project. We expect that the scientific and practical results obtained by LANDSLIP will be useful in other areas in India, and more generally in Asia, and in other parts of the world.