Landslide susceptibility in the Belt and Road Countries: continental step of a multi-scale approach

The Belt and Road Initiative is a collaboration project launched by the Chinese Government to connect more than 65 countries all over the word by developing infrastructures, facilities, and support collaborations among involved Countries. The Silk Road Disaster Risk Reduction is a sub-project of the Belt and Road Initiative focused on mitigation and prevention of natural risks in the involved countries. In this context, this work presents a method to approach landslide susceptibility zoning on a continental scale that takes into account the limitations due to the completeness of landslide inventories and the scale and data quality of causal factors. A first attempt to produce a pixel-based statistical susceptibility map is described. All the data and software used in this work are open and open source. The landslide susceptibility zoning has been carried out in south-Asia using the NASA-COOLR landslide dataset through the Weight of Evidence method and it has been evaluated and validated by means of the ROC analysis. The results reveal a good prediction capacity and highlights that slope, relative relief and annual precipitation are the causative factors that play a major role in predisposing slope instability in the study area. Based on them, the method will be applied to the rest of the Belt and Road Countries.