A systematic review for assessing the impact of climate change on landslides: research gaps and directions for future research

The magnitude and intensity of landslides due to changing climate have created environmental and socio-economic implications for society. Through an in-depth analysis of the existing research on landslides in a changing climate from 1996 to 2021, this paper aims to carry out bibliometric and thematic analyses, identify the research gaps in the existing literature, and suggest a future framework for climate change-induced landslide risk assessment and mitigation. The data for review was collected from the Web of Science and Scopus platforms using a set of relevant keywords. After meeting the exclusion and inclusion criteria, 200 studies were finally selected to analyze the current state of research. The findings revealed that most of the reviewed studies focused on economic vulnerability to landslides, while social and ecological aspects of vulnerability at the micro-scale were scant in the past literature. Uncertainty in landslide-climate modeling, lack of advanced models for predicting landslide risk, and lack of early warning systems were identified as the major research gaps. A holistic methodological approach is proposed for assessing landslide risk and devising landslide mitigation strategies. The identified research gaps and the proposed framework may help in the future progression of climate change-induced landslide research in spatial information science.