World Centre of Excellence for Landslide Risk Reduction: proposal by CNR IRPI

There is worldwide a mounting interest towards the operational forecasting of landslides, with particular regard to rainfall induced landslides. The main reason for this is the fact that landslides represent a serious hazard in many areas, and cause significant and repeated damage and economic losses to the society, posing substantial risks to people and infrastructure. Starting from these considerations, we recently started a IPL project initiative (IPL-206) on rainfall induced landslides and their consequences, (i) to review past and existing operational landslide forecasting and warning systems, (ii) to propose recommendations for the design, the implementation, and the validation of operational landslide forecasting and warning systems, and (iii) to identify the best procedure for decision making when information from different source are available. Following approval of the project, we propose here CNR IRPI to be a WCoE forLandslide Risk reduction to address the issue of landslide early warning systems (EWS), and reach the goal to define guidelines for the realization, implementation, validation and use of landslide EWS.