The Mekong delta, being the major region in promoting food security and socio-economic sustainability to the country and home to 20% of Vietnam‘s population, is at the same time particularly vulnerable to climate change and flood-related disasters. This vulnerability in combination with rapid urbanization has increase the negative impacts of floods on the Mekong cities during the last years.
While the provinces have formulated a number of legislative frameworks, policies and action plans to address disaster risks and negative climate change impacts, the implementation of integrated and sustainable measures for reducing flood risk in urban areas has so far been challenging. They were executed more in a reactive rather than a proactive manner. The lack of capacities and limited access to relevant risk analysis instruments has further limited the cities’ ability to implement suggested policy measures.
To address these challenges in the Mekong delta, SECO has approved a contribution of EUR 5 million in 2016 for the “Mekong Urban flood proofing and drainage project”. This TA Project will be implemented by GIZ between 2017 – 2019 in cooperation with the Ministry of Construction and three selected cities in the Mekong Delta: Long Xuyen, Rach Gia and Ca Mau. The project will promote integrated flood proofing solutions in urban infrastructure planning, facilitate scale-up of the activities to the regulatory level, develop the basis to include the effects and mitigation measures of climate change in integrated urban and infrastructure planning; and increase the cities preparedness and responsiveness to flooding and climate change through early warning systems.
On 30 March 2017, the implementation of this project was successfully kicked off in Can Tho in a workshop with more than 60 representatives from the Ministry of Construction of Vietnam (MOC), An Giang, Kien Giang and Ca Mau province, SECO, GIZ and other relevant stakeholders. The workshop has presented, discussed and approved the project implementation plans at national and subnational level, defined implementation mechanism and presented key technical topics of the project to the audience: The proposed work on the regulatory framework in cooperation with MOC, the development of suitability and risk maps for urban areas and their future use for urban / land use planning, approaches to regional data sharing and possible cooperation on early warning systems.
