'Landslides a silent killer'

2006-01-18 10:16

Shaun Tandon

Tokyo - Climate change and unchecked urbanisation are worsening the threat from landslides, an overlooked killer that could be limited with better planning, experts said.

Landslides pose risks for some of the world's most cherished cultural sites including Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca ruins perched in the Andes mountains of Peru, researchers said at the start of an international conference here.

While natural disasters strike without warning, more advanced prediction of landslides, discouraging development in risky areas, and evacuating people at imminent risk, could all save lives.

"There are a number of high-profile killers which are quite well-known such as earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes. What is much less known is that the killing mechanism in these events is frequently the subsequent landslides," said Janos Bogardi, director of the United Nations Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn.

Global network in the pipeline

Recent extreme weather, such as a record hurricane season in 2005, softens the soil and increases vulnerability to landslides, Bogardi said. Climate change has been seen as a possible culprit for a landslide last month in Yemen that killed 65 people, as temperature changes shifted boulders.

But the sprawling expansion of cities in the developing world is putting more people in the path of landslides, particularly in Latin America where "favela" shantytowns dot suburban slopes.

The three-day conference that opened on Wednesday at the UN University in Tokyo aims to take a step forward by pooling together national programmes on landslides.

The Tokyo meet, which follows up a January 2005 UN disaster conference in Kobe, Japan held in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, aims to set up a global network on landslide research based at Japan's Kyoto University.

Warnings in advance

Landslides alone have claimed an average of 940 lives annually from 1993 to 2002, but the toll is far greater when viewed as part of other disasters. About half of the 6 434 deaths in Kobe's 1995 earthquake can be tied to landslides, Kyoto University professor Kyoji Sassa said.

Sassa reported in 2001 that Machu Picchu was at risk of crumbling down after a series of small landslides. Other historic sites at potential risk of landslides include the seventh-century Huaqing Palace near Xian in northwestern China and pharaonic Egypt's Valley of the Kings, he said.

Landslide prediction is becoming increasingly sophisticated using mathematical models that examine rainfall and soil saturation, said Srikantha Herath, an engineering expert at the UN University in Tokyo.

Only wealthy Japan and Hong Kong are putting extensive cash into solidifying slopes from landslides, but the technology can benefit developing countries to give advance warnings of landslides, he said.

"With earthquakes there is basically no warning," Herath said. "But advanced monitoring and warning of landslides can really help address the loss of life."

- AFP