PROJECT

FRAMEWORK

As observed worldwide during the last decades, landslides are major deadliest natural hazards in mainland Portugal and Azores archipelago. In Portugal the number of deaths resulting from landslides registered an increasing trend (1865-2010), opposing the decreasing verified with other hydro-geomorphological hazards, such as floods. The overall increment of the building environment quality observed in the last decades in Portugal in response to the increasing quality of building construction techniques and codes did not result in the reduction of deaths due to landslides. Fatalities occurred mostly associated to rapid shallow landslides affecting people inside buildings and, more recently, inside vehicles, as a consequence of the increasing people's mobility.
From land use planning perspective, new urban areas are safeguarded since 2008 by the Portuguese regulations and practices that established land use restrictions on landslide hazard prone areas. However, these regulations do not solve the existing risk problem of people living in houses that were previously constructed in hazardous slopes. The high number of deaths and affected people as well as the frequent destruction of assets and disruption of economic and social activities due to landslides justifies the implementation of a landslide early warning system at the regional scale.

This project aims to develop and implement a soft technology/low cost prototype for landslide early warning, allowing a dynamic adjustment to a changing climate and changing land use working at a scenario basis. On the one hand, future changes on regional rainfall patterns due to climate change will be incorporated and evaluated in the warning system; on the other hand, expectable changes in land use will be considered to approximate future exposure and effects in risk analysis.

In this project attention will be given to two different types of landslide events that will be permanently monitored within the regional early warning system in hotspot risk areas:

(i) Major disastrous landslide events. In this scenario a generalized regional occurrence of landslides is considered. Our main goal is to provide information to civil protection services in order to anticipate and manage people mass evacuation from generalized landslide prone areas.

(ii) Minor landslide events. In this scenario different levels of territorial disruption are considered. Different frequency of landslide occurrence is expected to occur. The main target is to ensure the maintenance and operability of regional transport, energy and communications networks and the safeguarding of people lives.

The application of the early warning system will define warning communication procedures, assess response capacity of stakeholders and develop social capacity practices, reduce vulnerability and mitigate risk, providing a reduction of affected people, economic losses and critical infrastructures/basic services disruptions.

Conceptual model of the BeSafeSlide (BSS) project

Conceptual scheme adapted from COST Action Proposal OC-2017-1-22050 "Landslide early warning systems as tools for community resilience", Open Call OC-2017-1

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

To guarantee the continuity of regional rainfall series acquisition in the Lisbon region and the Douro Valley with the installation of two rain gauges;
To determine rainfall thresholds for landslide occurrence for different geological/geomorphological settings and landslide types;
To identify landslide hazard hotspots and risk hotspots to be managed at different risk mitigation and vulnerability reduction scales;
To assess to what extent the increment of frequency of rainfall extreme events resulting from climate change and raise of shallow slides frequency will aggravate the exposure trends;
To develop a low cost /soft technology people-centered Landslide EWS prototype;
To identify and manage on LEWS different types of landslide events: (i) major landslide disastrous events and (ii) minor disruptive landslide events;
To produce a portfolio of non-structural vulnerability reduction and landslide risk mitigation measures applicable within the context of landslide early warning systems;
To engage stakeholders cooperation and resources that operate at different spatial scales (national civil protection service, regional and local stakeholders and communities) on the different components of LEWS that can contribute to disaster and disruption risk reduction;
To develop the BeSafeSlide project website;
To promote the publication of project results in Peer-reviewed international journals and define guidelines to promote knowledge transfer on LEWS community resilience to landslides and risk.

BeSafeSlide (BSS) project flow chart