Assessing effects of and responses to climate change on environment and socio-economic development in mid-Central Vietnam

Info

Start date: 31 December, 2008 End date: 29 February, 2012 Project type: Pilot research cooperation projects (prior to 2013) Project code: P1-08-VIE Countries: Vietnam Thematic areas: Climate change, Lead institution: Roskilde University (RUC), Denmark Partner institutions: University of Copenhagen (UCPH), Denmark Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST), Vietnam Project coordinator: Mai Trong Thong Total grant: 4,400,000 DKK

Project summary

The project addresses the potential impacts of climate change on the occurance of disasters and other significant weather related phenomena during the last three decades in selected provinces in Mid -central Vietnam. The coping and adaptation strategies of local communities as response to stress factors, including climate changes, will be analysed with the aim to identify viable options of support for local communities faced with potentially severe changes due to climate change. Furthermore the impact on bio-physical local factors and health will be analysed. The project also contains an important strategic planning and governance component, which will address issues of multisectorial coordination of mitigation and adaptation policy response on national, provincial, and ditrict level. The projects has strong capacity building element in providing know-how and technology to the Vietnamese partner, including interdisciplinary problem-oriented research methodologies. Research will be organised as joint research between Vietnamese and Danish partners, including detailed research planning and fieldwork. Overall project leadership rests with the main aplicant, the Institute of Geography in Hanoi (IG) while Roskilde University acts as coordinator of the Danish research input. The project will, besides the capacity building efforts, produce research reports and organise workshops and conferences destined at disseminating results to planners etc.

Outputs

Our investigation data reveals that local people felt unusual increase in extreme weather events in the recent years such as higher temperature, more storms, long-lasting and more severe droughts and more frequent and severe floods, that fits with our recorded data and calculated results. The local people and authorities have taken their first indigenous adaptation measures such as change in crop calendar, conversion into crops and varieties tolerant of high temperature, salinity and drought. Agroforestry is becoming an increasingly important economic activity in the province. In the event of increasing natural disasters, the sustainability of livelihoods is at high risk, since acacia forests are easily collapsed, when storms are sweeping the province. We also saw the reduction of vulnerability as a precondition for successful adaptation taking place.
In addition, the study showed that there are a lot of biomass resources in Quang Nam, but there are also serious barriers for the implementation of biomass plants, such as insufficient technologies and lack of strong policy and regulatory framework for encouraging biomass electricity production.

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