Since 1968, there have been over 1,400 fatal landslides in Nepal, killing over 6,000 people.
I’m currently writing a paper on the patterns of fatal landslides in Nepal since 1968. This is an update on the paper we wrote almost 20 years ago (Petley et al. 2007) that examined the changing patterns of landslides there. This new paper reaches back rather further but also brings the analysis up to date.
As a part of this work, I have put together a dataset of fatal landslides. This is a hybrid – it incorporates a mixture of a long term study based on newspaper reports that was compiled in the DfID funded Landslide Risk Assessment in the Rural Access Sector project, my own data on global fatal landslides (which I’ve been compiling since 2003) and, more recently, the Nepali government dataset that is on the Bipad portal. Note that this dataset does not include seismically-triggered landslides.
As a result of this work, I have a chronology of fatal landslides – this is the pattern over this period:-
The main caveat here is the substantial change in methodology in about 2000, when data started to be collected in real time. This means that the data before that date probably underestimates the true impact. Thereafter, the data is likely to be quite consistent, but we do need to be alive to the impact of changing methodologies. Interestingly, though, there is some evidence that the dynamics of the monsoon changed in about 1996, when a marked increase in landslides is recorded.
Note the rising trend since 2000. It appears, although this needs further work, that there is a substantial increase in the number of fatal landslides in the most extreme years (this is when the monsoon is most intense). The three years with the largest number of fatal landslides have all occurred since 2020. There is also an apparent cyclicity in the data, but this may simply be an artefact or a coincidence.
The dataset includes 1,437 individual landslides that have claimed 6,195 lives. The data clearly shows both the rising impact of landslides in Nepal and the massive level of losses that they are imposing.
Reference
Petley, D.N., Hearn, G.J., Hart, A. et al. 2007. Trends in landslide occurrence in Nepal. Natural Hazards 43(1):23–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-006-9100-3
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