Impact of extreme weather events on the erosion and failure of natural slopes

Research Project, 2025 – 2030

The aim of the project is to develop methods that enable us to quantify and study the impact of erosion on triggering shallow landslides in natural slopes. With climate change, more frequent storms and extreme rainfall events are expected in Sweden (Hultén et al. 2007), and as a consequence erosion will increase. The focus is on sensitive clay slopes in Göta river valley, the area with the highest landslide susceptibility in Sweden. As vegetation plays a crucial role in both run-off and infiltration, the role of vegetation, both as a stability enhancer and an erosion mitigation measure will be studied. In the two-step approach adopted, an advanced hydro-mechanical model that combines bank erosion and slope stability will be utilised, prior to adding the impact of vegetation into the system. Finally, potential mitigation measures using Nature Based Solutions will be studied in a holistic manner. The novelty of the proposed approach is the integration of the various facets of a challenging problem by combining state of the art soil models with a multi-physics framework to study the stability of natural slopes subject to erosion. This is a significant advance from the approaches that are currently being used.