The Belt and Road Initiative covers an area across the Asia, the Europe and the Africa, characterized by complex geological structures and extremely undulating terrains. As a result, different kinds of geo-hazards, such as the landslide, the collapse and the debris flow, seriously hamper the socioeconomic development and the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative. It is the scientific basis for understanding the regional distribution pattern and the disaster mechanism of geo-hazards to identify the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of geo-hazards in the historical period in the Belt and Road regions. In this paper, based on the statistics of geo-hazards during 1922-2015 along the Belt and Road regions, the spatiotemporal characteristic and the influence factors are discussed. The statistical results show that (1) the geo-hazards along the Belt and Road regions show an irregular fluctuation trend, and the scale and the influence degree of geo-hazards are gradually increased; (2) India is the country with the highest frequency of geo-hazards. Furthermore, the frequencies of geo-hazards in the Southeast Asia, for example, Myanmar, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, South Asia, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and in the East Asia, for example, China, Japan, are significantly greater than in other countries; (3) in the studied period, one sees a frequency of 82.3 events and an average of 75 injurers and 292 deaths every year; (4) the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the Bangladesh-China-India-Burma Economic Corridor are the regions of a higher frequency of geo-hazards. The reasonable results of the risk assessment of geo-hazards conducted on the key regions along the Belt and Road can help better distribute the limited relief resource. The technologies of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Terrestrial Laser Scanning in the field investigation help to acquire high-precision data and provide the basic information for subsequent researches.

the Belt and Road  /  geo-hazards  /  spatiotemporal distribution