Challenges for landslide hazard and risk management in 'low-risk' regions, Czech Republic-landslide occurrences and related costs (IPL project no. 197)
Abstract
The presented work was performed within the scope of the IPL project no. 197, entitled 'Low frequency, highly damaging potential landslide events in 'low-risk' regions - challenges for hazard and risk management'. The Czech Republic is an example of a landslide 'low-risk' country with all the related challenges for long-term and sustainable landslide risk management.
We argue that the main challenge is to raise and maintain a corresponding level of public attention to landslide hazards and risks. Since hazard and risk recognition by the potentially affected people is the main precondition of any effective risk mitigation, we performed several tasks to provide as yet unavailable information about specific aspects of the occurrence of landslides in the Czech Republic which may attract the attention of the public, including the responsible authorities, to the landslide risk.
These aspects include new ways of updating a landslide inventory and compilation of a database of the cost of landslide mitigation works paid by the government. Landslide inventories derived from web sources, the unified system of traffic information of the national road authority and information collected by the Czech Geological Survey were compared.
The landslide inventory compiled by the Czech Geological Survey is the most complete, but in some cases, the other two inventories could be used to complete it with landslide events not yet registered. Landslide-related expenses of the state budget are not negligible and their uneven spatial distribution cannot be explained by landslide occurrences only, which calls for in-depth risk assessment.