In May 2025, I recorded 66 fatal landslides worldwide, resulting in 313 fatalities. The number of fatal landslides is significantly above the long term mean.
Somewhat later than planned, resulting from other workload challenges, this is my latest update on fatal landslides in 2025, covering the month of May. I hope to be able to post data for June in the next few days.
As always, allow me to remind you that this is a dataset on landslides that cause loss of life, following the methodology of Froude and Petley (2018). At this point, the monthly data is provisional.
In May 2025, I recorded 66 fatal landslides worldwide, resulting in 313 fatalities. This is very significantly above the 2004-2016 average number of landslides (n=28.3) and slightly above the average number of fatalities (n=308.8).
This is the histogram by month for the number of fatal landslides in 2025 through to the end of May:-
The figure, with the higher monthly total in May than for the previous months, primarily reflects the increases in rainfall that start to occur in many Northern Hemisphere areas in May, most notably pre-monsoonal precipitation in large parts of Asia. As such, the trend is quite typical.
This is the graph of the cumulative total number of landslides, organised by pentads. This goes to pentad 30, which ends on 30 May:-
As the above graph shows, at the end of May, 2025 was trending very much above the long term average, and it was remarkably similar to the exceptional year of 2024. This is quite surprising, but may reflect continued high atmospheric temperatures. The EU Copernicus atmospheric temperature note says the following:
“May 2025 was the second-warmest May globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 15.79°C, 0.53°C above the 1991-2020 average for May.“
As a teaser for the June data, this trend of exceptional landslide occurrence did not continue into the following month.
Reference
Froude M.J. and Petley D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 18, 2161-2181. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018