1. Quantifying the influence of informal housing on rainfall-triggered landslides in the humid tropics
- Author
-
Bozzolan, Elisa, Holcombe, Liz, and Pianosi, Francesca
- Subjects
landslides ,informal housing ,Uncertainty ,scenario building - Abstract
Rainfall-triggered landslides cause the greatest death toll in developing countries and such an impact might increase under climate change and ongoing urbanisation. In the humid tropics, rainfall is the main landslide trigger and climate change will likely change rainfall pattern and potentially landslide incidence rates. At the same time, rapidly expanding cities modify the natural environment, often increasing the susceptibility of slopes failure. This is particularly the case in informal settlements where unregulated slope cutting, vegetation removal and lack of surface water management can increase landslide occurrence. Landslide hazard assessment that accounts for the effect of both climate change and informal housing should therefore be used to inform disaster risk reduction decisions. However, climate and land cover change (from deforestation to informal urbanisation), if included, are generally analysed separately. This research gap might be explained by the lack of slope stability models that include hydrological slope dynamics, vegetation, and urbanisation, as well as a lack of methodologies that deal with the large uncertainty that such analysis involves. In particular, the uncertainty related to errors and incompleteness of the input data (common in developing countries) and future climate predictions often challenge the practical usefulness of current landslide hazard assessment approaches. This thesis addresses such data and methodological gap by providing a new methodological framework that includes informal housing and climate change in slope stability analyses. This new methodology is used to explore and quantify changes in slope stability under different natural and anthropogenic conditions while including a transparent representation of uncertainty (essential to support decision making) associated with both the slope properties and future climate predictions. First, the mechanistic model CHASM (Combined Hydrology And Stability Model) is extended to represent leaking pipes, septic tanks, and roof gutters (CHASM+). Secondly, CHASM+ is incorporated into the new methodology and applied in a typical data-scarce location of the humid tropics. The analysis demonstrates that informal housing increases landslide hazard and quantifies how the presence of informal housing modifies the natural susceptibility of slopes failure. Critical rainfall (intensity-duration) thresholds for triggering landslides are also evaluated, identifying a greater number of small-scale landslides for high intensity and short duration events when informal housing is included in the slope stability analysis. Finally, the results are transferred into regional hazard maps, which can be adjusted for different land cover and climate, demonstrating the importance of accounting for their joint effects on slope stability analysis when supporting environmental planning under changing conditions.
- Published
- 2021