The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
In January 2025, I have provisionally recorded 34 fatal landslides worldwide, resulting in 156 fatalities. As usual, there is further work to do to this data to get a definitive list. The map below shows the geographical distribution of these landslides:-
Note that this map hides clusters of landslides occurring close together – this is particularly the case in SE Brazil, where there was a significant number of events (see below).
The distribution is generally as expected for the Northern Hemisphere winter, with the clusters mainly occurring in South America and SE Asia, where seasonal rains are focused.
As always, a critical element is the occurrence of these landslides through time. For 2025, I’ll compare the data with 2024 (as this was an exceptional year) and with the 2004-2016 data presented by Froude and Petley (2018).
This is the January 2025 graph:-
As the graph shows, 2025 is running considerably above the long term mean (22 landslides to the end of pentad 6), and is almost identical to 2024.
I’m surprised that 2025 is running at such a high level given that we have moved away from El Niño conditions, which in a most simplistic analysis might have seen a reduction in the most intense rainfall events as the global atmospheric temperature reduced. But a reduction in atmospheric temperature did not occur through most of January. The ERA5 dataset suggests that January 2025 was the warmest on record. So, a working hypothesis might the landslide rate is tracking at a high level in response to these anomalous temperatures.
Atmospheric temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are lower now, so the global temperature should also reduce (but noting an anomalously high warming event in the Arctic at the moment). Thus, it will be interesting to see whether the fatal landslide rate also reduces this month.
There was one significant rainfall induced multiple landslide event in January 2025. This occurred around 12 January in the Ipatinga area of SE Brazil, with seven separate fatal landslides. In addition, I have recorded nine fatal landslides in Indonesia in the period between 13 and 29 January. The most deadly landslide occurred in the Hpakant area of Myanmar, where a failure of a mine waste lagoon killed an estimated 70 people. As usual, there is little detailed information available about this landslide.
Reference
Froude M.J. and Petley D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 18, 2161-2181. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018