News

Communications with stakeholders are important for the DECIDER project. The stakeholder workshop was originally planned to be in person at HCMC, but unfortunately the COVID19 pandemic in Vietnam didn’t allow holding such a big conference at present. Thus the workshop was turned to fully virtual on June 18, 2021. About 60 people joined the workshop, including the project partners and major stakeholders from (to mention a few):

• Water Resource Department and Southern Construction Management Department at Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD),
• Department of Southern Region Water Resources Management, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE),
• Ho Chi Minh City Institute for Development Studies (HIDS),
• Center for Regional and Urban Studies (CRUS),
• Southern Institute for Spatial Planning (SISP),
• Ho Chi Minh City Urban Planning Institute (UPI),
• Department of Planning and Architecture (DPA) of HCMC.

The major aims of the stakeholder workshop are: to share the project research progress and preliminary results with all partners; to exchange and discuss with local stakeholders on the development of a Decision Support Tool (DST); and to gether reflection and feedback on intermediate results and the way forward.

The workshop opened with welcome speeches by our Vietnamese partners Prof. Nguyễn Nghĩa Hùng (Vice-Director of SIWRR) and Prof. Le Tang Sang (Director of SISS). The consortium project leader Prof. Matthias Garschagen also sent greetings to all and gave an overview introduction of DECIDER. Following that, the scientific session presented the work packages of the project and intensively discussed research progresses on household flood profiles (LMU), flood vulnerability of firms and businesses (GSSC), hydraulic modeling in HCMC (LuFI), flood precaution and damage assessment (GFZ), and urban building and morphology classes (Uni-TUE).

The project partners p+r and ThINK then jointly presented the development and structure of a decision support tool, covering the aim, contents, identified user needs and basic functions of the DST. Stakeholders actively commented to this work and gave feedback with regard to the objectives, selected user profiles, DST design and measure selection options, as well as the draft measure fact sheet and attributes. The communications are very informative and helpful for especially further orienting the DST to real needs and local conditions.

The third part of the workshop is a reflection session on intermediate results and the way forward. Dr. Van Tran (UEL) started with a reflection speech and mentioned the serious flood risks in HCMC with some facts and historical opinions. He especially highlighted potential impacts of the DECIDER project, e.g. to form a combination of scientific research and local knowledge, an integration of various data sources, and a practical decision support tool for a wide scope of potential users. Dr. Pham Tran Hai (HIDS) provided another reflection comment. He first introduced the Ho Chi Minh City Inundation Mitigation Program 2016-2020 with its achievements and lessons learned. He further presented the directions for the new program for 2021-2025 and indicated the key objectives that DECIDER may support with its research findings, e.g. updating infrastructure, improving warning systems, and enhancing the local capacities through community networks.