The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
In April 2024, Jiangwan Town, which lies in the Shaoguan City administrative area of Guangdong Province, China suffered extremely heavy rainfall, triggering landslides and floods that caused extensive damage. A new paper in the journal Landslides (Yang et al. 2025) has provided an interesting initial review of this event.
Jiangwan is located at [24.6233, 113.2311]. The Planet image below shows the area – this image was collected on 12 March 2024, before the rainfall event:-
As the image above shows, the landscape is hilly with extensive forestry. The geology mainly consists on granitic rocks that are highly prone to weathering under the humid climate.
Whilst April 2024 was unusually wet as a whole, the main rainfall event occurred on 18 to 21 April. According to Yang et al. (2025), 447.9 mm of precipitation was recorded over a 72 hour period in the area around Jiangwan, an exceptional total for this area. Unsurprisingly, this intense rainfall on an area of steep, weathered topography triggered many landslides.
The Planet Labs image below shows the same area as above after the rainfall event. This area es exceptionally cloudy through the summer months, so the image is from 4 October 2024:-
The very large number of landslides is very clear in this image. This is best highlighted using a slider:-
Yang et al. (2025) have mapped the landslides using Planet imagery, which has a resolution of 3 m (which will limit the ability to map the smallest landslides). They recorded 2,663 individual failures across an area of 154 km2, mostly consisting of shallow landslides. They describe the impact:
“Aerial views reveal the devastation: houses and roads collapsed, riverside trees washed away, and the ground covered with mud up to a meter deep, strewn with debris.”
The Planet image below shows the area around Jiangwan itself, where the density of landslides is particularly high:-
It is interesting to note that the landslides occurred in densely forested areas. Debris trails in the channels can be seen, but it does not appear that there was a high level of channelised debris flows that we see in similar landslide events in, for example, Hong Kong. I assume that this is probably a result of a more subdued topography.
CTWANT posted some news footage of the aftermath of the landslides, including helicopter imagery showing some of the landslides:-
This cluster of landslides in Jiangwan is good evidence of the ways that the landscape is responding to the more intense rainfall events that are associated with climate change. Sadly, we will see many more events of this type in the years to come, and the costs that they will inflict will be severe.
Reference
Yang, G., Zhao, L., Qin, Y. et al. 2025. Clustered landslides induced by rainfall in Jiangwan Town, Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province, China | Landslides. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-025-02463-5
Planet Team, 2025. Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/