Unplanned housing developments in vulnerable communities on steep tropical and subtropical hillslopes in many developing countries pose major problems. The authors present a new low-cost, community-based approach to landslide risk reduction and report on the successful pilot undertaken in the Skate Town community, Castries, St. Lucia, West Indies.
In the Eastern Caribbean construction of drainage networks in communities afforded an improvement in slope stability - after a 1 in 100-year rainfall event there were no landslides on previously unstable slopes in densely populated urban communities. This has been recognised in policy terms in the first ever Caribbean-wide, 5-year risk reduction programme. Such evidence represents an important first step in developing realistic land use policies for landslide-prone areas occupied by those migrating to urban centres in the Eastern Caribbean.
