Landslides in the global geoheritage

This work is the first in its kind to highlighting the importance of landslides in the global geoheritage. So far, landslides – despite having been included in the global geoheritage - have received only minimal attention compared to much more popular and spectacular landforms. Our research aims at remedying this shortcoming. We firstly survey the literature to understand to what extent landslides have been considered as part of geoheritage and identified as geosites and/or geomorphosites. There are few cases of landslides defined as geomorphosites, and most of them are located in Europe. We define three new aspects that should be considered when identifying a landslide as a geomorphosite, namely: 1) past and present climate changes, 2) anthropic impact and 3) risk perception. These aspects, added to the values commonly used to define a geosite, are of particular relevance today, as anthropic activities and human-induced climate change are impacting on the environments and human communities all over the world. We report on well-known examples of landslides around the world that exemplify and incorporate these new aspects.

Acknowledgements: This study is funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in the framework of the project ANR-19-CE01-0010 PERMOLARDS