Editing Landslide (section)

== Climate-change impact on landslides ==
Climate-change impact on temperature, both average rainfall and rainfall extremes, and evapotranspiration may affect landslide distribution, frequency and intensity (62). However, this impact shows strong variability in different areas (63). Therefore, the effects of climate change on landslides need to be studied on a regional scale.    
Climate change can have both positive and negative impacts on landslides
Temperature rise may increase evapotranspiration, leading to a reduction in soil moisture and stimulate vegetation growth, also due to a CO2 increase in the atmosphere. Both effects may reduce landslides in some conditions.
On the other side, temperature rise causes an increase of landslides due to
* the acceleration of snowmelt and an increase of rain on snow during spring, leading to strong infiltration events (64). 
* Permafrost degradation that reduces the cohesion of soils and rock masses due to the loss of interstitial ice (65). This mainly occurs at high elevation.  
* Glacier retreat that has the dual effect of relieving mountain slopes and increasing their steepness.

Since the average precipitation is expected to decrease or increase regionally (63), rainfall induced landslides may change accordingly, due to changes in infiltration, groundwater levels and river bank erosion.
Weather extremes are expected to increase due to climate change including heavy precipitation (63). This yields negative effects on landslides due to focused infiltration in soil and rock (66) and an increase of runoff events, which may trigger debris flows.