Each year, landslides are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage and, on average, claim more than 1000 lives around the world. Although most common in mountainous areas, landslides can occur anywhere with enough local relief to generate gravitational stresses capable of causing rock or soil to fail. In recent decades, research rooted in engineering and the physical sciences, new technologies, and improvements in computational power have greatly advanced our understanding of the causes, triggers, and mechanics of landslides. However, these improvements and advances bear on only part of the landslide risk equation – hazard and exposure; other factors that affect risk are much less understood. Notably, vulnerability and coping capacity, two concepts most developed in the social sciences, play an important – but poorly understood – role in landslide risk. We provide an example of an attempt to estimate landslide risk, which illustrates the difficulty of adequately quantifying vulnerability. We also argue that landslide risk will almost certainly increase over the rest of this century, due to a large increase in global population, settlement and development of previously sparsely populated landslide-prone regions, and climate change.