The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
In most years, February sees comparatively low numbers of fatal landslides globally. As was the case in 2024, the February 2025 has bucked this trend. In total, I recorded 35 fatal landslides, resulting in 138 deaths, in February 2025. To place this is context, the 2024 total was 32 fatal landslides, whilst the average for the period 2004-2016 reported in Froude and Petley (2018) was 20.8 fatal landslides.
The graph below shows the cumulative total number of fatal landslides for 2025 (n=71 – note the small change in recorded landslides for January 2025 compared with my post last month) relative to previous years. The black line is 2025, whilst the red line is 2024:-
Please note that I make these figures available under a creative commons licence – please feel free to reuse with attribution.
As usual, a better way to present this data is to use pentads (five day blocks). The graph below shows the same data for pentads, extending through to pentad 12 (which ended on 1 March 2025, and thus includes one extra day comparted to the monthly data):-
The data is surprising, once again. At the moment, 2025 is slightly exceeding even the exceptional year of 2024, and the cumulative total is very significantly greater than was the case for the long term mean of Froude and Petley (2018).
The simple explanation for the high levels in 2024 was the high atmospheric temperatures associated with the El Nino event, on top of the long term trend of global heating. In 2025 the El Nino event has ended, so intuitively I would have expected the landslide totals to be reducing.
However, Copernicus data shows that global surface atmospheric temperatures remained exceptionally high (the third highest in the long term record). The Copernicus narrative states that:
“February 2025 was the third warmest February globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 13.36°C, 0.63°C above the 1991-2020 average for February, and only marginally warmer, by 0.03°C, than the fourth warmest of 2020.”
Thus, I would hypothesise that the high atmospheric temperatures may be continuing to cause higher than expected fatal landslide occurrence.
A key unusual aspect of 2024 was that the seasonal acceleration of fatal landslide occurrence, which is usually associated with the Northern Hemisphere late spring / early summer, occurred much earlier than usual. You can see this in the second graph above at around pentad 11. This may be replicated in 2025 so far, although it is too early to tell definitively. So, a key thing to watch through March and April is whether we see anomalously high fatal landslide occurrence again. I shall provide an update in a month.
Reference
Froude M.J. and Petley D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 18, 2161-181. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018
