Abstract
Landslides are devastating natural hazards in mountain terrain with significant impacts on the society and economy. The upper Chitral is part of the eastern Hindu Kush ranges and is frequently prone to widespread and damaging landslides, debris flow, and floods. Therefore, it is critical to assess the landslide hazard and their social, economic and environmental impacts, to contribute to disaster risk reduction. This study aims to assess the landslide hazard assessment utilizing the causative and triggering factors and evaluate the physical, social and environmental vulnerability and risk assessment. An extensive field has been conducted to develop a comprehensive landslide inventory and their distribution into different categories. The landslide causative parameters (geological, topographical and anthropogenic) are compared with the landslide inventory using a bivariate statistical model to develop a landslide susceptibility map with an accuracy of 89%. Moreover, building topology data has been acquired for more than 19,000 buildings to evaluate their proneness to landslides. Multi-criteria evaluation techniques have been used to determine the landslide's induced physical, environmental and social vulnerability, which is subsequently integrated with landslide hazard to assess risk. The results show that 28.3% of the total area is highly susceptible to land sliding. Furthermore, the impact of the predicted landslides explicates that 90% of the building/population is living in a very high-risk zone, while the remaining 10% are in a high-risk zone. The study can effectively be used for developing landslide mitigation strategies.