A severe landslide event in the Alpine foreland under possible future climate and land-use changes
- 1University of Graz, Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, Graz, Austria (douglas.maraun@uni-graz.at)
- 2Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Department of Geography, Jena, Germany
- 3FWF-DK Climate Change, University of Graz, Graz, Austria
- 4Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
- 5Joanneum Research, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Department, Graz, Austria
- 6National Research Council of Italy, Bologna, Italy
- 7AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Vienna, Austria
- 8Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK
Landslides are a major natural hazard, but uncertainties about their occurrence in a warmer climate are substantial. The relative role of rainfall, soil moisture, and land-use changes and the importance of climate change mitigation are not well understood. Here, we develop and apply a storyline approach to address these issues, considering a severe event from June 2009 in Austria with some 3000 landslides as showcase. The approach leverages on convection permitting simulations that realistically represent the meteorological event while sampling uncertainties. Depending on the changes of rainfall and soil moisture, the area affected during a 2009-type event could grow by 45% at 4 K global warming, although a slight reduction is also possible. Such growth could be reduced to less than 10% by limiting global warming according to the Paris agreement. Anticipated land-use changes towards a climate resilient forest would fully compensate for such a limited increase in hazard.
How to cite: Maraun, D., Knevels, R., Mishra, A. N., Truhetz, H., Bevacqua, E., Proske, H., Zappa, G., Brenning, A., Petschko, H., Schaffer, A., Leopold, P., and Puxley, B. L.: A severe landslide event in the Alpine foreland under possible future climate and land-use changes, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-7465, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-7465, 2022.
