Search Results (5)

With the growing threat of climate change, states are increasingly turning to large-scale infrastructure projects in order to control environmental conditions, especially in coastal areas. These projects are often planned and implemented in a centralized, top-down manner and sometimes fail to achieve their stated objectives in the face of “everyday resistance” from local residents and farmers. This study draws on interviews and secondary research to examine the contentious everyday politics of infrastructure in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, focusing specifically on how small-scale, surreptitious acts of “counter-infrastructuring” on the part of farmers, such as the construction of illicit wells and shrimp ponds, have undermined the top-down policy of “freshening” the coastal zone through the construction of large water-control works (namely, the Ba Lai dam). By elucidating the motives for farmer resistance, which are primarily economic rather than explicitly political, and the covert and largely uncoordinated means farmers employ to resist and subvert state infrastructure, this study contributes to our understanding of environmental politics in Vietnam and more broadly, with implications for the future viability of large-scale infrastructure projects, such as those aimed at adapting to climate change and sea-level rise in coastal regions. Full article

Every year, in the Vietnam Mekong Delta Coastal Zone (VMDCZ), erosions cause approximately 300 ha of agricultural land loss. Therefore, measures for shoreline protection are urgently needed. This paper discusses the impacts of protection measures in the Go-Cong Coastal Zone to prevent erosion/accretion processes, predicted by two numerical models, MIKE21-FM and TELEMAC-2D. Hard and soft measures have been proposed using breakwaters and sandbars, respectively. The simulations show that the erosion/accretion trends provided by both models are similar. For breakwaters, MIKE21-FM provides less accretion than TELEMAC-2D in areas extending over 300 m and 500 m from shorelines. However, for sandbars, MIKE21-FM shows higher accretion within areas extending over 500 m but less than 300 m. Sandbars cause higher accretion in a larger area, extending over 1000 m offshore. The simulation results allow us to propose two alternative measures: (1) a row of several breakwater units will be implanted at 300 m offshore. The length of each unit is 600 m, with a gap between two neighbouring units of 70 m and a crest elevation of 2.2 m above mean sea level (MSL). (2) A row of sandbar units will be posed at 500 m offshore, with a unit length of 1000 m and a gap between the two neighbouring units of 200 m. The crest elevation is fixed at MSL. Full article

Vietnam’s 3260 km coastline is densely populated, experiences rapid urban and economic growth, and faces at the same time a high risk of coastal hazards. Satellite archives provide a free and powerful opportunity for long-term area-wide monitoring of the coastal zone. This paper presents an automated analysis of coastline dynamics from 1986 to 2021 for Vietnam’s entire coastal zone using the Landsat archive. The proposed method is implemented within the cloud-computing platform Google Earth Engine to only involve publicly and globally available datasets and tools. We generated annual coastline composites representing the mean-high water level and extracted sub-pixel coastlines. We further quantified coastline change rates along shore-perpendicular transects, revealing that half of Vietnam’s coast did not experience significant change, while the remaining half is classified as erosional (27.7%) and accretional (27.1%). A hotspot analysis shows that coastal segments with the highest change rates are concentrated in the low-lying deltas of the Mekong River in the south and the Red River in the north. Hotspots with the highest accretion rates of up to +47 m/year are mainly associated with the construction of artificial coastlines, while hotspots with the highest erosion rates of −28 m/year may be related to natural sediment redistribution and human activity. Full article

The concept of the circular economy has become well known for its solution-oriented approach to transforming available resources into a closed-loop resource system. However, in the context of coastal areas, coastal resources seem to be ignored in the tourism production and consumption process. In relation to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this article discusses how sharing economy practices may sustain coastal resources through ecotourism, applying a sharing-economy theory that emphasizes changes in the new form—a circular economy—rather than a single traditional Airbnb model or ecotourism model. This study proposes a coastal sustainable development structure model based on the integration between the sharing economy and ecotourism with three modes—positive economic effects, positive economic pressures, and sustainable coastal development—and uses coastal residents’ expectations of their living conditions as moderating factors to investigate the impact of the circular economy on coastal sustainability. We developed a survey-based model that included 303 samples from the indigenous residents of 13 provinces throughout the Vietnam Mekong Delta. The results show that the integration of ecotourism with the Airbnb model has a positive effect on residents’ living conditions, supporting sustainable local development. However, the advancement of technology and residents’ awareness involves barriers to coastal development because the process of modernization is still limited in coastal areas. More specifically, in the case of the Vietnam Mekong Delta, our results suggest that limited technical knowledge and language ability stand as barriers to coastal businesses, showing that the lack of inter-regional connectivity limits the magnitude of local tourism in coastal areas. These findings are useful for assessing residents’ living conditions so that coastal development can work towards poverty reduction. Finally, the establishment and expansion of policies by local authorities can be an indispensable part of coastal economic development by limiting the negative effects of the abuse of natural resources and facilitating family businesses in coastal zones in an effort towards the integration of economic development and social and environmental responsibility. Full article

Over the last few decades, coastalscapes have been seriously threatened by the rising effects of climate change such as sea level rise, coastal degradation and extreme flooding. To cope with these threats, since 1992, international development organisations have promoted Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) and its implementation in particular in coastal regions of the “Global South”. Inspired by a political ecology of development approach, this paper analyses coastalscape metabolism and community level socio-environmental transformations in relation to ICZM implementation politics in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. ICZM was designed to integrate management of coastal regions and to promote socio-economic and environmental sustainability. By adopting the concept of metabolism to coastalscapes, and reflecting on their interactions, data were collected through qualitative field-research at the community level in the Mekong Delta. Research shows that ICZM and its development initiatives implementation slightly shaped coastalscape governance and communities relations, merely influencing policy-making and state bureaucratic structure and legitimation. Rather, the Mekong Delta coastalscape was reconfigured by complex metabolic socio-environmental transformations which embed global political-economic processes, shifting water flows and climate change dynamics. Full article