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Amidst the intensifying global climate change, the increasing frequency of extreme precipitation events poses significant challenges to natural ecosystems and human societies. Particularly within the context of rapid urbanization, the mechanisms underlying the influence of urban expansion on natural disasters such as landslides have emerged as a critical area of scientific inquiry requiring further exploration. While conventional wisdom often suggests that urbanization exacerbates the risks of geological hazards like landslides, the generality of this conclusion—given the intricate interplay of geographical and socio-economic factors—necessitates nuanced validation. This study adopts a fixed effects panel regression model, utilizing rainfall-induced landslides collected from field surveys, systematically analyze and quantitatively assess the impacts of precipitation variability on landslide hazards across regions with different levels of urbanization. Our observations reveal that, contrary to highly urbanized areas, regions with low levels of urbanization exhibit increased sensitivity to landslides in response to fluctuations in precipitation. This pattern is consistent across multiple temporal scales of precipitation analysis, including monthly total precipitation and maximum daily, three-day, and five-day precipitation amounts. Furthermore, an in-depth investigation of specific cities reinforces our understanding of the complex relationship between urbanization and landslide risk. In particular, this study quantifies the contribution of historical precipitation changes to landslide events in Jiangxi Province, indicating that historical precipitation changes were responsible for approximately 7% of total landslide occurrences, directly leading to about 215 landslide events (with a confidence interval of 164 to 301). These findings underscore the pivotal role of precipitation as a primary trigger of landslides. This study provides a novel perspective on the evolutionary pattern of landslide disasters during urbanization and establishes a scientific foundation for the development of effective disaster prevention and mitigation strategies, which can significantly enhance urban resilience.
Du et al. (Sun,) studied this question.