Patterns of fatal landslides in Shaanxi Province, China

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

China is a highly landslide-prone country, but the distribution of failures is not even in time and space. One of the most landslide-prone areas in Shaanxi province, in the northwest of the country. Thus, understanding patterns of fatal landslides there is key to reducing landslide risk nationally.

Back in 2021, the People’s Daily tweeted this video of a landslide destroying a transmission tower in Shaanxi:-

To that end, a new paper (Lian et al. 2025) in the Journal of Asian Earth Sciences is most welcome. This research has focused on the construction of a fatal landslide database for the Shaanxi province between 1996 and 2018, and then uses this to examine trends in time and space. Landslides triggered by earthquakes are not included in the analysis.

The headline is that there were 332 fatal landslides in this period, claiming 1,132 lives. Of these, about 85% were triggered by “natural factors” mostly rainfall, with the remainder being anthropogenic. The rainfall-induced failures mostly occurred in the summer months, reflecting seasonal rainfall, whilst the anthropogenic landslides were more evenly distributed through the year.

One really interesting aspect of this study is the temporal pattern of landslides, and its relationship with attempts to reduce losses from disasters. Lian et al. (2025) note that the Shaanxi provincial government enacted five yearly provincial disaster reduction plans, covering 2001-2005, 2006-2010, etc. Thus, they have looked at the number of fatal landslides in five year blocks. The average numbers of landslides per year are as follows:

Thus, a credible case can be made that the number of fatal landslides has fallen in more recent years, a pattern that is seen in other parts of China too. During this period there has been a tremendous amount of landslide research undertaken in China, more so than in any other country, and considerable effort has been focused on disaster risk reduction. However, the statistics show that there is still a long way to go, and climate change is likely to make this even harder in the coming decades.

Lian et al. (2025) highlight that there are some locations that remain as particular landsldie hotspots, most particularly “Yan’an and Yulin cities (in northern part of the province) and An’kang city (in southern part of the province)”. Additional efforts will be needed to reduce losses in those areas.

Reference

Lian, B. et al. 2025. Spatiotemporal variations of non-seismically fatal landslides in Northwest China: A case study from Shaanxi province. Journal of Asian Earth Sciences, 277, 106389. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jseaes.2024.106389

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