Abstract
Climate change and accelerating socioeconomic developments increasingly challenge flood-risk management in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta—a typical large, economically dynamic and highly vulnerable delta. This study identifies and addresses the emerging challenges for flood-risk management. Furthermore, we identify and analyse response solutions, focusing on meaningful configurations of the individual solutions and how they can be tailored to specific challenges using expert surveys, content analysis techniques and statistical inferences. Our findings show that the challenges for flood-risk management are diverse, but critical challenges predominantly arise from the current governance and institutional settings. The top-three challenges include weak collaboration, conflicting management objectives and low responsiveness to new issues. We identified 114 reported solutions and developed six flood management strategies that are tailored to specific challenges. We conclude that the current technology-centric flood management approach is insufficient given the rapid socioecological changes. This approach therefore should be adapted towards a more balanced management configuration where technical and infrastructural measures are combined with institutional and governance resolutions. Insights from this study contribute to the emerging repertoire of contemporary flood management solutions, especially through their configurations and tailoring to specific challenges.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 635-649 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Ambio |
Volume | 47 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Oct 2018 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Acknowledgements We would like to thank Dr. Nguyen Hong Quan, Dr. Vo Le Phu, Tran Duc Dung, Le Thuy Ngan and Gerard Pichel for their meaningful support and suggestions on this work. Long Phi Hoang received funding from the Dutch-Vietnamese Mekong Delta Plan project. Matti Kummu received funding from Academy of Finland project SCART (Grant No. 267463) and Emil Aaltonen foundation (‘‘eat-lesswater’’ project). Michelle van Vliet was financially supported by a Veni-grant (Project 863.14.008) of NWO Earth and Life Sciences (ALW). Lastly, we thank Professor Georgia Destouni and two anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions that helped to improve the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Author(s).
Funding
Acknowledgements We would like to thank Dr. Nguyen Hong Quan, Dr. Vo Le Phu, Tran Duc Dung, Le Thuy Ngan and Gerard Pichel for their meaningful support and suggestions on this work. Long Phi Hoang received funding from the Dutch-Vietnamese Mekong Delta Plan project. Matti Kummu received funding from Academy of Finland project SCART (Grant No. 267463) and Emil Aaltonen foundation (‘‘eat-lesswater’’ project). Michelle van Vliet was financially supported by a Veni-grant (Project 863.14.008) of NWO Earth and Life Sciences (ALW). Lastly, we thank Professor Georgia Destouni and two anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions that helped to improve the paper.
Keywords
- Challenges
- Climate change
- Flood-risk management
- Mekong Delta
- Socioeconomic developments
- Solutions