scholarly journals Building South Vietnamese delta settlements in the Whirlwind of climate change

Author(s):  
Marion Reinosa

Deltaic settlements worldwide are facing unprecedented challenges. This is especially the case in the Mekong Delta, where high population density, capital, and service provision increasingly intersect to expose vulnerable communities to the adverse effects of climate change. Due to a limited understanding of climate change, the presence of unique hydrological phenomena, and anthropogenic actions, the complex situation of the delta and its settlements has led to the implementation of inadequate architectural and urban solutions. This has caused abrupt socio-economic changes, shifting from an ecological integration mindset to a normative and disruptive approach resulting in the imposition of unsuitable models. Community capacity, which includes low-cost, circular and reuse practices, can offer more ecological perspectives on sustainable building in the delta. Illustrating local in-depth environmental expertise, communities have developed socially and environmentally adapted construction cultures. This paper argues for an alternative paradigm in which cities and settlements promote and integrate local building knowledge to enable architectural and urban forms to play a leading role in the resilience of South-Vietnamese deltaic cities and to mitigate developmental impact on the environment. Findings show a diversity of options and capacities at the local scale and flexibility in housing design. They also show that persistent gaps in policymaking and inconsistent perception of risk affects architectural and urban climate resilience. The discussion and conclusion advance the potential of local capacity in the building of South-Vietnamese deltaic cities, the need to integrate local knowledge and community capacity into policy, and the necessity to better assess local perception barriers to formulate localised, integrated and multisector policies to build resilient and sustainable South-Vietnamese settlements.

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Prakash Upadhyay

This paper explores the changing climate, its impact, and the diversified practices of agropastoral adaption by a mountain community of Nepal. The findings reveal that there is an unswerving link between the changes in climate and their impact on the community and its adaptation options. The vulnerability and risk induced by the climate change has threatened the agropastoral subsistence, the sociocultural and economic structure, and the food sovereignty of the Loba community of Mustang district of Nepal and made them experience unanticipated complications in livelihood. In a changing climate, the community has attuned and restructured its adaptive strategy with diversified practices of collective labour in a traditional agropastoral system of landholding, mystical connectivity and seasonal relocation as an adaptive response ensuring the shared sustenance of the com munity. The challenge of climate change began long ago; it will persevere and be long- lasting. Hence, this paper argues for the need for a prudent adoption of measures to maintain an environmentally suitable agropastoral system of liveli hood well-being. Beyond enhancing community capacity and climate resilience, it is necessary to streamline and readjust indigenous sociocultural institutions by expanding their adaptive capacity, while recognizing the cultural dimensions grounded in systems of meanings and relationships and the way people and their culture experience and respond to exceptional climatic changes.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keira Webster

Climate change is a systemic issue embedded in and interconnected with the social and economic makeup of a city. Building urban climate resilience requires innovative, collaborative solutions that hinge upon the openness and availability of current and contextual data. Open data tools, in stimulating information sharing, civic engagement, and innovative products, can contribute to climate change planning, building lasting resilience. Through an exploratory research methodology, this paper explores 17 international use cases, providing a basis for the implementation of open data tools in the realm of urban climate resilience, through the following five themes: 1) risk and vulnerability assessment; 2) the inception of initiatives; 3) diverging approaches to preparedness; 4) community mobilization; and 5) mitigation and adaptation. This research aims to spark a dialogue on the intersection of open data tools in urban climate resilience strategies, demonstrating open data as an appropriate tool to cultivate shared understanding and collective action.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 2931 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Feldmeyer ◽  
Daniela Wilden ◽  
Christian Kind ◽  
Theresa Kaiser ◽  
Rüdiger Goldschmidt ◽  
...  

In the face of accelerating climate change, urbanization and the need to adapt to these changes, the concept of resilience as an interdisciplinary and positive approach has gained increasing attention over the last decade. However, measuring resilience and monitoring adaptation efforts have received only limited attention from science and practice so far. Thus, this paper aims to provide an indicator set to measure urban climate resilience and monitor adaptation activities. In order to develop this indicator set, a four-step mixed method approach was implemented: (1) based on a literature review, relevant resilience indicators were selected, (2) researchers, consultants and city representatives were then invited to evaluate those indicators in an online survey before the remaining indicator candidates were validated in a workshop (3) and finally reviewed by sector experts (4). This thorough process resulted in 24 indicators distributed over 24 action fields based on secondary data. The participatory approach allowed the research team to take into account the complexity and interdisciplinarity nature of the topic, as well as place- and context-specific parameters. However, it also showed that in order to conduct a holistic assessment of urban climate resilience, a purely quantitative, indicator-based approach is not sufficient, and additional qualitative information is needed.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fahmyddin Araaf Tauhid

Climate change is affecting urban areas by increasing the intensity and frequency of climate-related disasters such as flooding, sea level rise, drought, etc. The trend is expected to rise significantly without proper intervention. Urban housings as the concentration of people and economic growth are the most impacted. This condition calls to study green infrastructure/GI strategies as a more sustainable way than the conventional. Such GI approach not only mitigate and adapt the impacts but also improve the urban climate resilience, particularly in the housing sector. Therefore, this study aims to propose a conceptual framework to integrate the elements for the implementation of GI for mitigating and adapting climate impact for urban resilience improvement. This study identified elements to employ GI for housing climate resilience: public awareness; land use and development regulation; land and property acquisition; environmental management plan; housing strategy; fiscal and taxation; and governance. This framework is a new tool for scoping and assessing urban housing vulnerability to climate change by helping stakeholders to systematically consider the benefit to introduce GI scheme in respective efforts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Anna Bilska

Abstract Climate change may have severe consequences for urban areas and many cities, such as those situated on deltas, are already threatened. The paper claims that the solution for endangered areas is the embedding of urban climate resilience. The concept of resilience is put forward to bring a broad perspective to a city with an indication that the city is a complex system with developed relations, both inward and outward. Social and institutional aspects of these relations are highlighted as they have the highest potential to make the city resilient. The paper indicates three fundamental features of embedding the resilience of urban areas to climate change: network building, a strategic approach and implementing urban projects. A practical application of these fundamental features is evaluated using the case study of Rotterdam. The research shows the reliability of these bases and indicates key characteristics of each fundamental feature: the network should be multidimensional with solid institutional and interpersonal relations, the strategy should have a holistic approach and project implementation needs the engagement of all the city actors.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (11) ◽  
pp. 2649-2672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Meerow

Coastal megacities pose a particular challenge for climate change adaptation and resilience planning. These dense concentrations of population, economic activity, and consumption—the majority of which are in the Global South—are often extremely vulnerable to climate change impacts such as sea level rise and extreme weather. This paper unpacks these complexities through a case study of Metropolitan Manila, the capital of the Philippines, which represents an example of “double exposure” to climate change impacts and globalization. The city is experiencing tremendous population and economic growth, yet Manila is plagued by frequent natural disasters, congestion, inadequate infrastructure, poverty, and income inequality. The need for metro-wide planning and infrastructure transformations to address these problems is widely recognized, but governance challenges are a major barrier. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and other primary and secondary sources, I argue that climate change and globalization, in combination with Manila’s historical and physical context, critically shape metro-wide infrastructure planning. Focusing on electricity and green infrastructure, I find that the largely decentralized and privatized urban governance regime is perpetuating a fragmented and unequal city, which may undermine urban climate resilience. This study extends the double exposure framework to examine how global processes interact with contextual factors to critically shape urban infrastructure planning, and how the resulting system conforms to theorized characteristics of urban climate resilience. In doing so, I help to connect emerging literatures on double exposure, urban infrastructure planning, and urban climate resilience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ombretta Caldarice ◽  
Nicola Tollin ◽  
Maria Pizzorni

AbstractThe concept of resilience has been developed for over 40 years in different disciplines. The academic discussion on defining resilience is thriving to create interdisciplinary understandings and meanings. Simultaneously, resilience has firmly entered into planning practice to address vulnerabilities and cities' exposure facing to present and future hazards particularly related to climate change effects. In the last twenty years, a growing number of cities are adopting local climate actions, and urban resilience is also gradually a crucial part of international and national policies worldwide. Despite the increasing attention to urban resilience, its implementation at the local scale and the required increasing ambition are still lagging, also due to a lack of dialogue among researchers (the scientific level), policy-makers (the normative level) and practitioners (the operational level). Following the 2018 CitiesIPCC Research and Action Agenda recommendations, this paper contributes to improving understanding barriers, opportunities, and needs for science-policy-practice dialogue for urban climate resilience. The paper analyses the urban climate resilient strategiesstrategies of the Italian metropolitan cities, concluding that a science-policy-practice dialogue is lacking in implementing evidence-based climate change resilience policies and actions actions at the local scale. Starting from the Italian case study, the paper suggests an iterative process to unlock the science-policy-practice dialogue for contributing to operationalise urban climate resilience fostering thanks to a multiscalar governance approach.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keira Webster

Climate change is a systemic issue embedded in and interconnected with the social and economic makeup of a city. Building urban climate resilience requires innovative, collaborative solutions that hinge upon the openness and availability of current and contextual data. Open data tools, in stimulating information sharing, civic engagement, and innovative products, can contribute to climate change planning, building lasting resilience. Through an exploratory research methodology, this paper explores 17 international use cases, providing a basis for the implementation of open data tools in the realm of urban climate resilience, through the following five themes: 1) risk and vulnerability assessment; 2) the inception of initiatives; 3) diverging approaches to preparedness; 4) community mobilization; and 5) mitigation and adaptation. This research aims to spark a dialogue on the intersection of open data tools in urban climate resilience strategies, demonstrating open data as an appropriate tool to cultivate shared understanding and collective action.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujit Kumar SIKDER ◽  
Asad ASADZADEH ◽  
Elias Danyi KUUSAANA ◽  
Bishawjit MALLICK ◽  
Theo KOETTER

This study focuses on stakeholders’ participation, perceptions and local contextualization in the Informal Settlement (IS) regularization processes in Khulna City. These processes are undertaken to address livelihood challenges of IS dwellers and to operationalize development initiatives in informal regularization projects. Adopting both a qualitative and quantitative approach, the research results show that IS formation in Khulna City started slowly with rural immigration. These immigrants remain vulnerable to climate change although some initiatives were undertaken since the last 20 years to improve their living conditions. The IS dwellers and local leaders initially participated in these settlement-upgrading initiatives due to accompanied incentives but they became adamant after the project period ended. It was also found that the city local government and NGOs do not have any permanent arrangement to sustain the IS regularization processes. The analysis of the interrelationships among the stakeholders revealed that the relevant public agencies are in conflict, and the role of the private sector is less recognized. The initiatives undertaken so far have limited success especially in granting tenure security, and the private landowners or local authorities that trespassed public spaces resort to forceful eviction. Amidst all these, there is the need for the formulation and implementation of climate resilience policies that address stakeholder participations in mitigating climate change consequences and enhance livelihood development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (22) ◽  
pp. 6268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Beery

Climate resilience is an important mix of climate mitigation and climate adaptation designed to minimize current and future disruption while promoting opportunity. Given the importance of the regional and local arena for consideration of impacts of climate change trends and needs for climate action, climate resilience in one community, Duluth, Minnesota, is considered. At the core of this project is the climate resilience question: what can we currently be doing in our communities to prepare for projected climate change while simultaneously improving life for current residents and visitors? Given the growing importance of outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism in Duluth, the role this sector may be able to play in climate resilience is considered. Using action research methodology, the research process of adjusting, presenting, and conducting follow-up from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Adaptation for Coastal Communities workshop is presented. The study takes a unique look at one workshop outcome, a Duluth Parks and Recreation planning tool. Specifically, a resilience checklist is presented as a useful sample outcome of the overall process. Beyond the study community, the role of outdoor recreation to serve climate resilience is explored and affirmed.


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