Community based landslide warning systems

Dr David Petley of Durham University (UK) has been a staunch friend of STH over the past 3 years and I consult him regularly on the many aspects of landslide hazards.
I reproduce part of his recent article on community based landslide warning systems; interestingly the article comes at time when we in STH will be starting work on the same topic in a small landslide prone village in Kalimpong - using much the same methods discussed in the article. The excerpt is placed below :-

"An increasingly important area of work in landslides is the development of tools to generate warnings to potentially-affected communities.  Whilst technologically-led examples have been available for a couple of decades now, and have proven to be quite effective, the growing emphasis is on low tech approaches that can be operated by and within communities.  This is entirely pragmatic – we know that most of the severe losses, whether measured in terms of lives lost or in proportion of per capita GDP, occur in less developed countries, particularly in Asia and Latin America. ... "

For those interested Dr Petley's full length article is available here


Praful Rao