Impacts of Climate Change on Land Use Change in the Red River Delta and its Community Livelihood Change
Info
Start date: 1 January, 2010 End date: 29 February, 2012 Project type: Pilot research cooperation projects (prior to 2013) Project code: 09-P03-VIE Countries: Vietnam Thematic areas: Climate change, Natural resource management, Water management and sanitation, Lead institution: Vietnam National University (VNU), Vietnam Partner institutions: Southern Institute for Water Resources Planning (SIWRP), Vietnam International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines Vietnam Institute of Meteorology Hydrology and Environment, Vietnam Project website: go to website (the site might be inactive) Project coordinator: Pham Van Cu Total grant: 4,950,000 DKKProject summary
In a context where Vietnam is considered as one of the most potentially affected by climate change, our project aims to understand the relation between climate change and its impacts to livelihood change of rural community in the Red River Delta (RRD) in Vietnam. The project identifies three pilot sites for research: one in coastal zone in Thai Binh and Nam Dinh provinces, one in Hanoi and its urban fringe, and one in the border with hilly zone of Vinh Phu Province. These three sites will formulate a trans-deltaic sectional profile which would be representative both for bio-physic and socio-economic contexts of the whole RRD. The sites are characterized by such phenomena as the increase of landless household number in the urban fringe and the increasingly migration from villages towards the city and the fragile economic situation in the coastal zone of RRD. VNU will organize a team of specialists from Earth sciences, socio-economic and political sciences for implementation of the project. Student involvement in the project is a part of human resources of our project. The involvement of local authorities is the bridge linking our research to local needs in sustainable development and especially in optimizing community livelihood change in the context of climate change. Remote sensing and GIS will be used as the major tool for modelling spatial data of interdisciplinary nature in our research and to support the development planning in the pilot sites in our project.
Outputs
For climate change modelling, 4 Regional Climate Models have been used for dynamically downscaling different Global Climate Models outputs: RegCM3, MM5, REMO and CCAM and these outpus are cross-compared to 20-km resolution product from the MRI/JMAJapan.
In land use change analysis we have used 40 multidate images (23 Landsat, 9 SPOT, 4 ASTER, 2 ALOS, 1 Quickbird, 1 Workview-2) with object-oriented classification and Geomod and CA Markov models for modelling land use changes.
The theory of livelihood framework is adapted and finalized to fit RRD context of land use policies and strategies for agricultural development. The results of 1,000 household surveys in the RRD have been digitized and stored in databases.
The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model applied on the Ba Vi catchment to predict the impact of management and climatic conditions is among the first research in the domain in Vietnam.
Three scientific papers on the results of our work have been submitted and three others in being prepared. The project involved 3 PhD, 7 MSc in research works and 4 undergraduate students have used project data for their thesis.
The participation committed by local authorities is one of the reasons for which the data collection, household survey have been successfully accomplished.
The first two years have given encouraging effect on the networking with others projects and institutions in Canada, Belgium, USA and especially, with Vietnamese ones.
