Strengthening community resilience to global change stresses through flood-based farming systems in the Mekong Delta

Project Overview

The project seeks to improve our understanding of how farmers in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) have been affected by environmental pressures and we propose an environmentally friendly solution that can enhance urban and ecosystem resilience. This work is focused on An Giang and Dong Thap provinces of the VMD and it consists of three main parts:

(1) assessing the hydro-ecological complexity of the landscape,
(2) understanding local livelihood and resilience capacity, and
(3) implementing flood-based agricultural systems.

Social surveys and focus group discussions will be carried out to assess how farmers are coping with hydrological changes due to climate change, upstream dams and sand mining. A hydrodynamic model will also be developed to inform the implementation of a sustainable flood-based agricultural system in the VMD. A pilot study will be conducted to develop three separate flood-based crop models and evaluate the viability of these crop models.

This nature-based and environmentally friendly system is expected to be useful in mitigating some of these environmental challenges that farmers are experiencing, including problems created by high dikes and triple cropping. Overall, this project seeks to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers who often struggle with low incomes and are the most affected by macro-environmental processes that are often beyond their control. We hope that our work can boost farmers’ capacity to produce a greater variety of cash crops for local consumption and in turn ensure a stable supply of food for Vietnam and Southeast Asia..
 

Funding Sources

National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore

Project Years

2023 to 2025