An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Past, Present and Future Flood Risk in Viet Nam

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The impact of hydro-meteorological hazards is jointly determined by environmental and social factors. These interactions between environmental change and human responses generate great uncertainty when evaluating household vulnerability. In low-income countries, hydro-meteorological risks have been evolving due to climate change, changes in agricultural exploitation, changes in household mitigation strategies and waterway engineering activities related to hydropower and agriculture. In addition, flood risk itself affects the economic decisions of households in the short- and longer-run. The proposed research will advance our understanding of how hydro-physical and socio-economic conditions and processes interact. Our novel, interdisciplinary approach will advance current knowledge and methods in both the physical and social sciences through the development of: 1) A technique for producing socio-physical flood models that account for interactions and feedback between social actors and physical systems; 2) A method for generating high-resolution social vulnerability maps based solely on remotely sensed data. Within the context of Vietnam specifically our research will generate: 3) Detailed, multidimensional models of household-level risk and resilience strategies within communes in the Central Highlands; 4) High resolution maps of social vulnerability in the Central Highlands validated with household-level survey data; 5) A socio-physical flood risk model for the Central Highlands; 6) Scenario projections that outline potential future risks based on possible changes in key hydro-physical parameters, socioeconomic conditions, land use, household mitigation strategies, and public interventions. Our geographical focus on the Central Highlands is informed by a clear dearth of recent research into flood risk in this area relative to other regions, such as the Mekong Delta and coastal areas in recent years, and by the major socio-economic changes affecting the region (rural-urban migration, changes in cropping patterns and investment, intensification of floodplain activity). Our models, maps and scenarios for communities in the Central Highlands will be developed by integrating state-of-the-art hydrodynamic flood models, satellite imagery, detailed land-use maps, household survey data and field experiments. The results will improve our ability to predict and mitigate the impacts of hydrological hazards in the Central Highlands of Vietnam specifically, but also in other regions affected by similar hazards. To our knowledge, our proposal is the first one to combine a state-of-the-art hydrodynamic flood model with data on resilience strategies and economic activities that is geo-located at the household level anywhere in the world. This contribution will allow us to incorporate household resilience when projecting future scenarios and thus make a significant contribution to policy-relevant knowledge, while also providing new modelling methods that could be applied in other regions.