Due to its geographic localization in a typhoon corridor, Hai Phong has to cope with such a security scenario at least once a year. For instance, typhoon „Damrey“ striked the city on 27th of September 2005 with a wind speed of up to 150 km/h and caused serious damages to sea dykes, while 50 people died and about 300.000 people were evacuated from the coastal region, making it the largest evacuation operation so far.

In current debates on climate change and extreme weather events, politicians and scientists frequently use the term “resilience” in the context of spatial planning and extreme weather events. In general, resilience describes the ability of a system (e.g. a city) to adapt both reactively and proactively to changing environmental conditions and to recover quickly from the negative consequences of external shocks like extreme weather events. However, in Hai Phong such events often cause total breakdown to critical infrastructures like ports, major transport axes as well as power and communication networks. Therefore, Hai Phong urgently needs an intelligent adaptation concept which accounts for the topic of climate resilience in detail.

The overall research aim of the project is to find out, which infrastructures or areas in Hai Phong are particularly prone to natural hazards. By defining measurable indicators that can be applied to a city and its subsystems (e.g. environment, economy, infrastructure, society) the specific resilience capacity can be evaluated with appropriate scientific methods like Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). By calculating and combining a priori defined indicators in a Geographic Information System (GIS), the resilience capacity of critical infrastructures to extreme weather events in Hai Phong will be quantitatively assessed and visualized through maps and figures. For this purpose, the F-Project “Smart Resilience Hai Phong” mainly refers to existing and freely available data, primarily digital satellite images and 3D Digital Elevation Models (DEM). The GIS- and remote sensing based detection of possible vulnerabilities can be used to identify hot- and coldspots for new and innovative improvements like detailed adaptation strategies or early warning recommendations. Another fundamental part of the project is the Smart-City concept, which will be brought in line with the current urban planning policy of strengthening the development of Smart Cities in Vietnam as well as the resilience concept. In this context, digital story maps by ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) are providing a contemporary and internationally comprehensible means of online communication to make newly gained knowledge and data available to the general public.

In order to perform an accuracy assessment of the prior digital satellite image analysis as well as to gain important local experience of the study area, an excursion and field work in Vietnam is a mandatory part of the F-Project. The practical handling of the Leica Zeno 20 GPS/GNSS handheld computer for high-precision measurement of point geodata for accuracy assessment will be intensively trained for field research in Hai Phong. Interviews with local stakeholders should provide further information and feedback for essential indicators. The excursion will extend over 10 days and take place in March 2020 in close cooperation with Vietnamese students and professors of the Haiphong University.

Students who participated in the project, gained new important skills in the following fields:

• GIS-based multi-criteria-decision-analysis
• Knowledge about the terms resilience and smart city
• Digital Satellite-based remote sensing techniques
• Planning and implementation of field researches
• Digital storytelling and data management