Global Fatal Coastal Landslides

Abstract. Coastal cliffs shape the world’s coastlines, providing areas of beauty, habitat, scientific discovery, and recreation. However, as erosional features, coastal cliffs can also pose fatal hazards. This paper presents a database of global fatal coastal landslides from public databases and media articles. In total, the coastal landslide database includes 292 fatalities resulting from 114 landslide events from 1927–2024. Landslide events occurred in 32 countries, with the most events in Spain (20), the United States (19), France (14), and the United Kingdom (10), and include two 10-event hot spots on Reunion Island, France, and San Diego County, California, USA. Most fatalities occurred in temperate regions, with about half of events occurring during months with above average precipitation (and half below), differing from databases that include non coastal fatal landslide events driven largely by rainfall. The database is likely incomplete in part from reporting bias, and the analysis presented here should be interpreted with caution. However, the present results suggest that the timing of coastal fatal landslides may be influenced by (a) elevated rainfall causing reduced cliff stability, leading to more failures in wet seasons and (b) time periods of increased tourism and recreational beach activity, exposing more people to coastal cliff failure hazards in relatively dry seasons. The results can help inform beach hazard management.