Landslides cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of damage annually. With over half of the world’s population in urban areas, and both urbanization and precipitation extremes expected to increase in the future, understanding how urban landscapes are affected by precipitation-triggered landslides is a pressing need.

The new study used a large database of precipitation-triggered landslides across the Pacific coast of the U.S. and isolated the influence of precipitation changes using a specific type of computer model. When the researchers controlled for other factors, like slope steepness, rock type, and wildfire, they found that urban landslide hazard was up to 10 times more sensitive to variations in precipitation than in rural areas. That means that the same increase in rainfall in rural and urban areas could be 10 times more likely to cause a landslide in a city.

The new research is published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

…