Socioeconomic consequences of landslide events in Uttarakhand, India: linking landslide susceptibility with vulnerability and disaster risk management

Abstract

Landslides represent a recurrent and devastating natural hazard in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India, with their spatial occurrence and impacts governed by varying degrees of landslide susceptibility shaped by terrain, geology, and climatic triggers. Beyond immediate physical damage, recurring landslide events impose severe and long-lasting social and economic consequences on vulnerable mountain communities. This study examines the impacts of landslides in Uttarakhand by systematically linking GIS-based landslide susceptibility zonation with household-level indicators of income loss, infrastructure damage, and displacement. Geographic Information Systems were employed to delineate relative landslide susceptibility zones by integrating key conditioning factors, including slope gradient, lithology, land use and land cover, drainage density, rainfall intensity, and proximity to fault zones, and a weighted overlay approach was used to classify the terrain into low-, moderate-, and high-susceptibility zones, representing relative slope failure propensity rather than probabilistic hazard estimation. Primary household data collected from settlements within these zones were analysed using one-way ANOVA, Chi-square tests, and correlation analysis to evaluate differential impacts. The results indicate that households residing in high-susceptibility zones experience substantially greater economic losses, with average income reductions of approximately 30 percent and infrastructure damage affecting nearly 60 percent of critical assets, often leading to restricted accessibility and community isolation. A strong positive correlation between infrastructure damage and income loss highlights how repeated landslide impacts entrench households in cycles of economic stress and displacement. The findings highlight the importance of integrating spatial susceptibility assessments with household-level impact analysis to inform disaster risk reduction and resilience planning, emphasizing the need for improved infrastructure design, strengthened community awareness, and periodic updating of GIS-based landslide susceptibility assessments to reduce long-term vulnerability in landslide-prone regions of Uttarakhand.