Climate change amplified the 2009 extreme landslide event in Austria.

Abstract

Landslides are an important natural hazard in mountainous regions. Given the triggering and preconditioning by meteorological conditions, it is known that landslide risk may change in a warming climate, but whether climate change has already affected individual landslide events is still an open question, partly owing to landslide data limitations and methodological challenges in climate impact attribution. Here, we demonstrate the substantial influence of anthropogenic climate change on a severe event in the southeastern Alpine forelands with some estimated 952 individual landslides in June 2009. Our study is based on conditional event attribution complemented by an assessment of changes in atmospheric circulation. Using this approach, we simulate the meteorological event under observed and a range of counterfactual conditions of no climate change and explicitly predict the landslide occurrence probability for these conditions. We find that up to 10%, i.e., 95 landslides, can be attributed to climate change.