Landslides are one of the most widespread geohazards in Europe, producing significant social and economic impacts. Rapid population growth in urban areas throughout many countries in Europe and extreme climatic scenarios can considerably increase landslide risk in the near future. Variability exists between European countries in both the statutory treatment of landslide risk and the use of official assessment guidelines. This suggests that a European Landslides Directive that provides a common legal framework for dealing with landslides is necessary. With this long-term goal in mind, this work analyzes the landslide databases from the Geological Surveys of Europe focusing on their interoperability and completeness. The same landslide classification could be used for the 849,543 landslide records from the Geological Surveys, from which 36% are slides, 10% are falls, 20% are flows, 11% are complex slides, and 24% either remain unclassified or correspond to another typology. Most of them are mapped with the same symbol at a scale of 1:25,000 or greater, providing the necessary information to elaborate European-scale susceptibility maps for each landslide type. A landslide density map was produced for the available records from the Geological Surveys (LANDEN map) showing, for the first time, 210,544km 2 landslide-prone areas and 23,681 administrative areas where the Geological Surveys from Europe have recorded landslides. The comparison of this map with the European landslide susceptibility map (ELSUS 1000 v1) is successful for most of the territory (69.7%) showing certain variability between countries. This comparison also permitted the identification of 0.98Mkm 2 (28.9%) of landslide-susceptible areas without records from the Geological Surveys, which have been used to evaluate the landslide database completeness. The estimated completeness of the landslide databases (LDBs) from the Geological Surveys is 17%, varying between 1 and 55%. This variability is due to the different landslide strategies adopted by each country. In some of them, landslide mapping is systematic; others only record damaging landslides, whereas in others, landslide maps are only available for certain regions or local areas. Moreover, in most of the countries, LDBs from the Geological Surveys co-exist with others owned by a variety of public institutions producing LDBs at variable scales and formats. Hence, a greater coordination effort should be made by all the institutions working in landslide mapping to increase data integration and harmonization.
As a country with limited direct experience of natural disasters, the UK has not developed a sophisticated legal and regulatory framework for the mitigation for many of the geological hazards, including landslides, which affect the population. Although the 1966 Aberfan disaster led to a limited amount of research into landslide distribution and mechanisms, it left no long-term legacy of managing landslide risks. A number of high-profile events in the late 20 th Century, and a series of 'near-misses' since then have failed to stimulate a significant social or economic awareness. Perhaps understandably, this has limited political motivation to develop landslide management policies. This paper examines this situation and discusses some implications of how landslides are dealt with by the UK government and devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.Policy is based mainly upon national assessments of geohazards (including landslides) carried out in the 1980s and 1990s. These assessments provided the basis for planning policies and guidance that to some degree control development on or around unstable ground. Although this was an encouraging start, limited resources and political support over the longer term ultimately meant these initiatives failed to develop into an effective, integrated, national response to landslide hazards. Policies and regulations are open to interpretations which vary between devolved governments, building regulations and local planning offices.Crucially, the resulting system offers no framework for the legal or financial responsibilities for hazard management. As a result, landslide management in the UK has been influenced more by planning and political structure than actual risks to the population. This situation partially arises from the limited data available on the overall cost of landslides on a national basis. Until this situation is rectified it will be difficult to establish a mitigation strategy based on risk.This paper discusses how landslides are managed in the UK and provides examples from around the country of how the system responded to some serious landslides occurring over the last twenty years. Examples are presented that show how this framework has affected the investigation and mitigation of different types of landslides. The paper also briefly discusses the role of insurance in landslide hazard management and highlights the effective response of Transport Scotland in the aftermath of the debris flows in 2004.
The paper describes results to date of a continuing monitoring study of coastal 'soft cliff' recession at the British Geological Survey's (BGS's) Coastal Landslide Observatory (CLO) on the east coast of England at Aldbrough, East Riding of Yorkshire. The cliffed site, part of the 50 km long Holderness coast, consists of glacial deposits, and is one of the most rapidly eroding coastlines in Europe. This rapid rate of erosion provides an ideal opportunity for observation and process understanding because it facilitates the collection of data over periods of time encompassing significant new landslide events at the same location. The results of two approaches are reported: first, terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) surveying (TLS); second, the installation of instrumented boreholes. The aim of the research is to combine these to investigate the role of landslides and their pre-conditioning factors and the influence of geology, geotechnics, topography and environmental factors on cliff recession. To date, an average recession rate of 1.8 m a −1 and a maximum rate of 3.4 m a −1 have been recorded for the site. The establishment of the CLO and its conceptual geological-geotechnical model are described in a related paper.
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