ViWaT Mekong Planning
Duration: 01.11.2018 - 30.10.2022
The existence of the fascinating Mekong Delta in Vietnam is threatened. Climate change and sea level rise in combination with excessive groundwater use leads to land subsidence of several centimetres per year and to serious coastal erosion, as well as to land use conflicts and large-scale salinisation of surface waters and aquifers. As a result, the regional availability and quality of the available freshwater resources and thus the living conditions of 17.5 million people are severely endangered. The region urgently needs sustainable and adapted strategies, concepts and technologies for the protection and conservation of land and water resources, as well as appropriate measures that contribute significantly to secure the existence of the Mekong Delta. In this context, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the ambitious and large-scale ViWaT-Mekong joint project „Integrated Solutions for Sustainable Development in the Mekong Delta – Land, Water, Energy and Climate“ for three years as part of the programme „Client II – International Partnerships for Sustainable Innovation”.
In order to find holistic solutions for the challenges of the Mekong Delta, ViWaT-Mekong relies on three pillars that deal with different priority topics and are called ViWaT Engineering, ViWaT Planning and ViWaT Operations. The Department of Spatial Information Management and Modelling (RIM), School of Spatial Planning at the TU Dortmund University, is responsible for the subproject 10 „Water-relevant Land Use“ using modern geo-information systems, remote sensing, especially radar remote sensing and UAV technology in the ViWaT-Mekong-Planning pillar. ViWaT-Mekong-Planning is coordinated by Prof. Dr. H. Stolpe (Chair of eE+E Environmental Engineering and Ecology at the Ruhr University Bochum) and funded by the BMBF with around two million euros. The Co-Project ViWaT-Mekong in Vietnam is regarded as a „flagship project“ by the Vietnam Ministry of Science and Technology.
The aim of the ViWaT-Mekong-Planning pillar is to develop strategies to ensure that water in the Mekong Delta is used sustainably and that its inhabitants are better able to live with the consequences of climate change. Furthermore, it aims to contribute to a future-oriented regional plan for the Mekong Delta.