Landslide risk management analysis on expansive residential areas – case study of La Marina (Alicante, Spain)

Cantarino, Isidro; Carrion, Miguel Angel; Palencia-Jimenez, Jose Sergio; Martínez-Ibáñez, Víctor

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-1847-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-1847-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-21-1847-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 6

Research article

|

15 Jun 2021

Research article |

| 15 Jun 2021

Landslide risk management analysis on expansive residential areas – case study of La Marina (Alicante, Spain)

Isidro Cantarino, Miguel Angel Carrion, Jose Sergio Palencia-Jimenez, and Víctor Martínez-Ibáñez

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Final revised paper (published on 15 Jun 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Aug 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'general comments', Paola Salvati, 24 Sep 2020
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Víctor Martínez Ibáñez, 03 Feb 2021
RC2: 'review', Eleftheria Poyiadji, 14 Dec 2020
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Víctor Martínez Ibáñez, 03 Feb 2021

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (08 Feb 2021) by Paola Reichenbach

AR by Víctor Martínez Ibáñez on behalf of the Authors (03 Mar 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (04 Mar 2021) by Paola Reichenbach

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (15 Mar 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The paper ‘Landslide risk management analysis on expansive residential areas. Case study of La Marina (Alicante, Spain)’ provides an analysis of the growth of landslide risk in residential areas that experimented dramatic urban sprawl in a long time series (between 1960 and 2017. In more details, the authors compare the expansion of construction of new buildings with the growth of landslide risk. My overall impression is that: i) the paper is well written and the aim of the research deserves attention ii) the readability of the work and especially the method description and the interpretation of the results need some clarifications.
For these reasons, this paper might be considered of interest even if I arise some doubts on the reliability of the cluster analysis because of lack of details. Indeed, more effort should be devoted to the proper method description, choice of the number of clusters and groups, all issues that can be solved with major revisions. Main comments below:
1) The introduction section underline the role played by a suitable risk management and in particular of a suitable risk building management. However, this part of the story is a bit neglected in the interpretation of the results. I strongly suggest to specify better the focus of the analysis since the introduction and to enforce the results’ discussion part accordingly.
2) On the same line of point 1, it would be interesting to underline that the story descripted on Figure 1 is only one of the potential scenarios. In fact, would be interesting to present another figure where another urban sprawl model is presented (e.g. it is possible to argue that more safer places are occupied at the very beginning of the urban growth process while during the urban sprawl less convenient places in terms of landslide risk, or general risk, are used). This would give the chance to introduce the pivotal role of landslide risk management in the growth of these territories.
3) I have some concerns on the cluster analysis. In particular, there is a lack of details. As an example, why the choice of 14 clusters? Finally, the organization in the four groups A, B, C, D is not clear too. On the same line, please provide more details on the sample selection and in the application of the cluster analysis.
4) The other major point is related to the description of the results. In the present version, this part is hard to digest. In order to improve the readability of the section it would be interesting to present results in Figure 6 aggregated also for municipalities with suitable risk building management with respect to the non-suitable municipalities.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (25 Mar 2021)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (07 Apr 2021) by Paola Reichenbach

AR by Víctor Martínez Ibáñez on behalf of the Authors (16 Apr 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (28 Apr 2021) by Paola Reichenbach

AR by Víctor Martínez Ibáñez on behalf of the Authors (29 Apr 2021) Manuscript

Short summary

Risk ratio (RR), developed in this paper, stands out as a robust indicator for finding the relationship between residential construction and its associated landslide risk. It proved especially useful for municipalities on the Mediterranean coast, since it differentiates between those that take on a higher risk and those that do not. Our research establishes valuable criteria to find how suitable a specific local entity's risk management is and explore what causes the incidence of landslide risk.