Vulnerability of buildings to landslides: The state of the art and future needs

Landslides are one of the most destructive hazard processes that cause tremendous loss of lives and damage to the built environment. As a crucial part of disaster risk management, building vulnerability assessment aims to link building damage with landslide hazard intensity and building characteristics in a physically based manner. This thorough review summarizes the progresses made in the assessment of building vulnerability to landslides in the past two decades and presents the future needs. First, a literature dataset about vulnerability to landslides is analyzed. After that, we present building failure mechanisms under landslide impact and building damage state classification systems, which are the basis for building vulnerability assessment. Then, we classify the existing building vulnerability models into four types: experience-based models, indicator-based models, data-driven models and mechanism-based models. The analysis procedures and key characteristics for each type of vulnerability models are presented and compared. Significant uncertainties on damage definition, data acquisition, model development and output interpretation are identified. Recent progress on vulnerability assessment in the multi-hazard context is emphasized subsequently. Recommendations on vulnerability assessment are presented at the end, focusing on consistency and accuracy improvements.