Global fatal landslides in 2024 – the situation at the end of May
The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
I thought it would be useful to provide an update on the pattern of fatal landslides in 2024 to the end of May. Clearly, in the aftermath of the terrible 24 May 2024 landslide in Papua New Guinea, this has been a high profile issue over the last fortnight. There have been some very good articles written about the background causes of that particular event, and of landslides more generally.
So, as a reminder, my data is for fatal landslides only, and in this case I am using landslides to describe all mineral-based mass movement phenomenon, including rockfalls, debris flows and mudflows. I don’t include snow avalanches, and in this analysis I don’t include landslides triggered by earthquakes. There are references at the end of this post that describe the science of this data.
The graph below shows the cumulative total number of fatal landslides that I’ve recorded in 2024 to date, calculated in pentads (five day blocks). This data is to 30 May 2024:-
