Long-term landslide impacts and adaptive responses in rural communities: Using historical cases to validate the cumulative causation approach

Abstract

The assessment of landslide impacts provides key information for understanding the hotspots of landslide vulnerability and risk, but it has mostly relied on accounting of immediate social and economic losses while neglecting the long-term implications for local development and respective post-disaster adaptive responses to landslide events. In this paper, we propose and validate an alternative approach that focuses on landslide impacts in terms of their long-term effect on the functional operation of communities and municipalities. We apply a cumulative causation model to historical case studies in rural areas of Czechia (Central Europe). The study is based on a qualitative analysis of written and iconographic documentary data from archives, which enabled us to identify the impacts of historical landslide events and adaptive responses taken by rural communities. We identified sequences of five adaptive responses: abandonment, relocation, resistant recovery, marginalisation, and non-development. Based on validation through the typologically diverse multi-case study, we assert that re-focusing the current research on the long-term implications of landslides for local development provides valuable insights to understand drivers of community adaptive responses, and clarifies the actual effects of landslide hazard on the functioning of social systems in rural areas.