The Teaching and Research Unit Human-Environment Relations (HER), Department of Geography at LMU Munich conducts innovative research on sustainability transformations in coupled human-environment-systems. A big part of the research concentrates on advancing our knowledge on risk and adaptation related to climate and environmental change, from an empirical and theoretical perspective. In doing so, the unit’s research covers three fields in particular:
- develop and apply scientific methods to assess past, current and especially future trends in risk as they unfold at the interface of climate change hazards and changing human societies and infrastructures.
- develop, test and apply methods to evaluate different options for risk reduction and adaptation and how they are negotiated within the wider risk governance in societies.
- assess when and how transformative change for risk reduction becomes necessary and how it can be fostered pro-actively.
As the coordinator of the project, LMU plays a key role in the organization, implementation and documentation of the project workshops and the coordination with key actors on the Vietnamese side as well as for the processing of the project results in policy briefs and the project reports.
The research subprojects of LMU aim at the development of a conceptual analysis and assessment framework for urban vulnerability scenarios as well as the participatory elaboration and provision of concrete vulnerability scenarios for Ho Chi Minh City. This includes tasks of the collection, analysis and assessment of adaptation options and criteria for decision-making of various stakeholders, based on a standardized survey of flood-affected households in different urban structure types in Ho Chi Minh City. LMU also leads the development of the comparative and integrative evaluation framework of DECIDER and transform it into an interactive interface and integrated into the Decision Support Tool.