People Vulnerability to Landslide: Risky Behaviours and Dangerous Conditions by Gender and Age

Landslides are frequent and destructive geo-hydrological events that cause harm to people every year worldwide. We used a catalogue on 1039 landslide fatalities, occurred in Italy in the 50-year period 1970–2019, to determine the dependence of the fatalities on gender, age and circumstance of death. The updated version of the Italian landslide fatalities catalogue includes information on the exact time of the occurrence of the fatal landslide events and the circumstances of death. Possible relations between time of the day and fatalities occurrence are analysed. Males landslides fatalities occurred frequently outdoor, along roads mainly involving drivers or passengers travelling in vehicles, indicating a specific dangerous death contingence preferentially occurring in daylight. Conversely, female landslide fatalities occurred more frequently indoor. To consider the demographic and socio-cultural changes over time, we performed a temporal analysis splitting the catalogue into three overlapping subsets 30-year each. In the three time periods, we estimated the expected fatalities by gender and age, using national census data and a multinomial distribution. Such estimates were compared with the observed landslide fatalities distribution. We identified the age categories over or under represented when the observed fatalities were respectively higher or lower than the modelled expected deaths. The analysis shows that for all the periods landslide male fatalities compared to the female ones are significantly higher than those expected by census data, indicating both a diverse propensity towards the risk taking and a different degree of exposure between males and females.