Early warning strategies to cope with landslide risk

Technicians who want to mitigate landslide risk have a variety of options available to them, from active measures addressing the reduction of the probability of occurrence of landslides, to structural engineering works designed to decrease the vulnerability of elements at risk, to early warning systems to adopt in areas where, in specific circumstances, the risk to life increases above tolerable levels. This paper presents the key elements of numerous early warning strategies implemented to cope with weather-induced landslide risk around the world, defines a coherent framework to classify and analyse landslide early warning systems, highlights the Author's most recent research experiences on these systems, and provides comments on a series of issues relevant for directing future multidisciplinary research endeavours on this topic. A pivotal role for the discussion is played by an original framework proposed to identify the main components of an early warning system for weather-induced landslides. The framework is based on a clear distinction among three different modules: the landslide model; the warning model, which includes the landslide model; and the warning system, which include the warning model.