Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

136 Measuring Household Resilience to Floods: a Case Study in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta by Kien V. Nguyen and Helen James This article was originally published in Ecology & Society , 18(3), 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05427-180313 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 ) license ABSTRACT The flood is a well-known phenomenon in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta (MRD). Although people have experienced the impact of floods for years, some adapt well, but others are vulnerable to floods. Resilience to floods is a useful concept to study the capacity of rural households to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods. Knowledge of the resilience of households to floods can help disaster risk managers to design policies for living with floods. Most researchers attempt to define the concept of resilience; very little research operationalizes it in the real context of “living with floods”. We employ a subjective well-being approach to measure households’ resilience to floods. Items that related to households’ capacity to cope with, adapt to, and benefit from floods were developed using both a five-point Likert scale and dichotomous responses. A factor analysis using a standardized form of data was employed to identify underlying factors that explain different properties of households’ resilience to floods. Three properties of households’ resilience to floods were found: (1) households’ confidence in securing food, income, health, and evacuation during floods and recovery after floods; (2) households’ confidence in securing their homes not being affected by a large flood event such as the 2000 flood; (3) households’ interests in learning and practicing new flood-based farming practices that are fully adapted to floods for improving household income during the flood season. The findings assist in designing adaptive measures to cope with future flooding in the MRD. Keywords: impacts; floods; Mekong River Delta; resilience; vulnerability; well-being INTRODUCTION Floods are a familiar and frequent feature of life in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta (MRD) (Socialist Republic of Vietnam 2004). Among disaster events, flood frequency, damage and mortality were ranked as the second most severe after the impacts of typhoons in Vietnam (Imamura and To 1997). Half of the MRD’s total area (about 2.0 million ha) is annually flooded (Tuan et al. 2007). Floods bring fish, wash farm residuals, deposit silt sediment, purify water, kill pests, and wash alum, which makes the soil of the delta fertile (Tien 2001b; Tran et al. 2008). It is estimated that the average fish capture in the delta is about 500 kg per household per year, providing a significant protein source for local people (Mekong River Commission (MRC) 2002, Nguyen and Binh 2004). Every year, the flood deposits around 150 million tonnes of fertile sediment on paddy fields, so rice farmers achieve good yields after every flood season thanks to water and sediment brought by the flooding (Tien 2001b). Traditionally, people relied on floods for building their livelihoods in the flood prone region of the delta (Biggs et al. 2009). More recently, farmers can develop flood-based livelihoods to improve household income during several flood months (Nguyen 2008). However, some people are vulnerable, while some are resilient to flood events (Lebel et al. 2006). The flood can be seen as an “external shock”, if the flood is either too “big’ or too “small”, it exceeds the coping capacity of households. Local people distinguish between flooding that is “large”, “moderate” and “small” (Tien 2001b). The flooding of 1998 was thought to have been the smallest flood in the past 80 years (Figure 1). A small flood often does not cause damage to property, houses, crops and other livelihood activities and assets, but it affects rural livelihoods in different ways. Poor people are more likely to lose their income from fishing activities as they cannot catch many fish due to low water. The large floods occurred in 1850, 1937, 1961, 1966, 1978, 1984, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, and 2002 (Can Tho University 1995, Socialist Republic of Vietnam 2004). The worst flood, in 2000, affected 11 million people living in 610 flooded communes, of which 4.5 million people lived in the 77 most affected subdistricts (communes) where flood levels exceeded more than 3 meters (Nguyen et al. 2003). In addition, more than 800,000 houses were inundated; 50,000 households had to be evacuated; 500,000 households needed emergency support; and 800,000 high school students had to stop their studies (Tien 2001a). About 55,123 ha of rice crop were completely destroyed and an additional 159,260 ha of rice were inundated and so had to be harvested immediately (Tinh and Hang 2003). The total direct economic cost of the 2000 flood was estimated at USD 289.8 million (1$~VND 13,800 in 2000). There is additional evidence that a rise in sea level due to climate change will increase the risk of flooding in the MRD, which will affect the livelihoods of millions of people (Wassmann et al. 2004, Dasgupta et al. 2007, Eastham et al. 2008, Reid 2008). Sea level is expected to increase by 75 cm by the end of the 21st century in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta (Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment 2009).