Dr Ugur Öztürk, former post-doctoral researcher and present guest from GFZ Section 2.6 ‘Earthquake Hazards and Dynamic Risks’, has been awarded a 1.5 million euros ERC Starting Grant for his ‘UrbanSlide’ project. The prestigious EU grant is awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to excellent young scientists who have 2 to 7 years of experience after their doctorate. It enables them to initiate their own projects, put together teams and pursue research ideas that are as promising as they are challenging.

As part of ‘UrbanSlide’, Öztürk wants to decipher the complex dynamics of the risk of landslides in urban areas. His research focusses on rapidly growing tropical cities. Here, informal, i.e. unauthorised, urban expansion can often be observed on steep slopes, which makes them particularly susceptible to landslides.

“With UrbanSlide, we want to close the fundamental knowledge gap regarding the dynamics of landslide risk, which results from the complicated interplay of social, climatic and urban factors. In particular, the quantitative findings derived will support the development of measures to reduce landslide risk in cities by identifying the extent and priority regions of future landslide risk,” says Ugur Öztürk.

While the project focuses on landslide risk, it lays the foundation for research into other hazards such as flooding, seismic activity and urban heat islands.

“Ultimately, UrbanSlide aims to contribute to the broader discussion on climate justice, particularly how and why natural hazards disproportionately affect impoverished communities in low- and middle-income countries,” explains Öztürk.

Ugur Öztürk carried out the essential preparatory work for his project proposal during his time at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and at the University of Potsdam. He will now set up his research group at the University of Vienna. He will continue to be associated with the GFZ as a guest scientist, also within the framework of this project.

The project in detail

The number of victims of landslides will increase worldwide: 65 million people are already threatened by them today, and this figure could rise to 90 million by 2050. There are various reasons for this. On the one hand, the number of people living in endangered regions is growing, especially in urban areas in the tropics. On the other hand, the risk of landslides is increasing due to the climate-related increase in extreme weather events. Furthermore, there is a lack of practical measures and sound policies to deal with the growing landslide risks.

The global urban population has grown from 30 per cent in 1950 to around 50 per cent today and is likely to reach 68 per cent by 2050. This increase in the urban population and the associated, often unplanned changes to the landscape exacerbate the risk of landslides, particularly in the tropics. For example, informal, i.e. unauthorised, house construction could reduce slope stability and endanger the people living there.

At the same time, man-made climate change could double landslide-relevant precipitation extremes and thus also increase the risk of landslides.

The key interactions between urbanisation, demographic composition, precipitation and landslides are well known. Nevertheless, conventional risk assessments ignore the feedback between these risk drivers. Furthermore, they focus on past observations and do not consider their future states. This makes proactive risk management difficult.

UrbanSlide aims to unravel the complex shaping of landslide risk by investigating the causal interactions between societal, environmental and urbanisation-related risk factors.

With the aim of ‘pre-empting landslides’, UrbanSlide will develop a hybrid model that integrates process-based and statistical models, both based on empirical knowledge of the interactions between society and the environment.

A major focus will be on predicting the various human activities that influence the risk of landslides. Ultimately, UrbanSlide will quantify the potential future landslide risk in rapidly expanding tropical urban centres to facilitate informed decision-making.

The project consists of three core components:

• Mechanistic landslide hazard module: to model the physical processes that contribute to landslide risks.
• Machine learning based urban expansion module: To predict future urban growth and its impact on landslide vulnerability.
• Urban (social) vulnerability module: Empirical assessment of the social aspects of risk, including the dynamics of informal settlements and their influence on landslide hazards.

About the person

Dr Ugur Öztürk researches the risks of natural hazards, in particular the spatial patterns of landslides. He uses statistical learning models to better link landslides with their triggers, such as heavy rainfall and earthquakes. Landslides in urban areas and their role in urban development are increasingly coming into focus.

Öztürk has been a postdoctoral researcher at the German Research Centre for Geosciences Potsdam in Section 2.6 ‘Earthquake Hazards and Dynamic Risks’ since 2018. Since 2020 he has worked primarily at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Geography at the University of Potsdam and has been a guest at GFZ. He also completed his doctoral thesis there between 2015 and 2018 as part of the ‘NatRiskChange’ graduate school funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), in which the GFZ is also involved.

At 1^st July 2025 he will take up a position as project leader at the Department of Geography and Regional Research of the University of Vienna. He will remain associated with the GFZ as a visiting scientist as part of the ERC project UrbanSlide.

Before coming to Potsdam, he worked as a research assistant at the Research Institute Water and Environment (fwu) at the University of Siegen from 2013 to 2015. He completed his Master's degree in Civil Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, in 2012 and his Bachelor's degree at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey in 2010.