There is worldwide a mounting interest towards the operational forecasting of landslides, with particular regard to rainfall induced landslides. The main reason for this is the fact that landslides represent a serious hazard in many areas, and cause significant and repeated damage and economic losses to the society, posing substantial risks to people and infrastructure. Starting from these considerations, we recently started a IPL project initiative (IPL‐206) on rainfall induced landslides and their consequences, (i) to review past and existing operational landslide forecasting and warning systems, (ii) to propose recommendations for the design, the implementation, and the validation of operational landslide forecasting and warning systems, and (iii) to identify the best procedure for decision making when information from different source are available. Past and existing operational landslide forecasting and warning systems are being examined with these aims, highlighting their distribution in the different countries/continents, their level of accuracy during past events, the effective adoption of the systems by local authorities and the forensic aspects during the operation phase. Follow this first analysis, recommendations for the design, the implementation, and the validation of operational landslide forecasting and warning systems will be proposed. The project is addressed to all those governmental and administrative bodies in charge of the land management and dealing with civil protection issues. These could use the project outcomes, in direct cooperation with scientific bodies, to design, implement, and validate landslide early warning systems, personalized in function of the main physical and meteorological characters of their own areas of study/interest, aimed at attempting to mitigate the risk related to landslides through the adoption of the most suitable strategies.