Resettlement and the environment in Vietnam: Implications for climate change adaptation planning

Abstract

Increasingly the environment, and climate risks in particular, are influencing migration and planned resettlement in Vietnam, raising the spectre of increased displacement in a country already confronting serious challenges around sustainable land and water use as well as urbanisation. Planned resettlement has emerged as part of a suite of measures being pursued as part of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation strategies. This paper provides an historical, political, legal and environmental overview of resettlement in Vietnam identifying key challenges for framing resettlement as climate change adaptation. The paper outlines the scale of past resettlement in Vietnam, identifying the drivers and implications for vulnerability. Detailed case studies of resettlement are reviewed. Through this review, the paper reflects on the growing threat of climate change and the likelihood of increased displacement associated with worsening climate risks to identify some critical considerations for planned resettlement in climate change adaptation planning.

Disentangling the concepts of global climate change, adaptation, and human mobility: a political-ecological exploration in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta

“…Building upon the imagination that climate change is a direct driver of human mobility, the suggested development interventions (experimentation) among the studies comprise of three overarching solutions: minimizing out-migration through providing technical and financial support for adaptation to climate-change affected areas (Koubi et al, 2016); creating safe and assisted migration corridors (Hugo, 2011;van der Geest et al, 2012); and assisting resettled households to build resilience (Miller, 2020;Miller & Dun, 2019). These solutions correspond to three groups of households: those who stay, those in transition, and migrants.…”

“…These solutions correspond to three groups of households: those who stay, those in transition, and migrants. All three groups should be provided external assistance, and building their resilience is the new mantra (Miller & Dun, 2019). Here, attention is paid to whether human mobility is voluntary or forced (or: whether staying is voluntary or forced), the extent to which climate change has been the major cause of migration, and new vulnerabilities in host-regions (Black et al, 2011b).…”

Political ecologies of resettlement in river deltas

“…Resettlement has been discursively produced as the suitable way to cope with not only current, but also future expected impacts of climate change (e.g. Biermann & Boas, 2010; Gebauer & Doevenspeck, 2015; Miller & Dun, 2019). Decision makers often argue that delta people's exposure to climate‐induced sea level rise, storms, inundation and coastal or river bank erosion can and ought to be reduced through resettlement away from these ‘high risk areas’ or ‘danger zones’ (Barnett & Webber, 2009; McAdam, 2015).…”

“…In a first publication, she uses the concept of just resilience to comprehend the repercussions that resettlement entails by particularly emphasizing affected people's disrupted relations to valued places, between each other and to established ways of living (Miller, 2019b). Based on a review of past resettlement in Vietnam in combination with three case studies (one of them in the Mekong Delta), Miller and Dun (2019) present in a second paper critical considerations for resettlement as part of CCA planning in order to reduce the risk and likelihood of maladaptation. Scrutinizing two resettlement schemes in the Mekong Delta in a third publication, Miller et al (2022) explain resettlement project failures -taking shape as increased outmigration from resettlement sites -with the lack of adequate governmental support of resettled people to (re-)establish familiar or alternative livelihoods at the assigned new residences.…”

Guest Editorial: Geographies of engagement, livelihoods and possibility in South and Southeast Asian deltas

“…Climate change expands the dimensions of this point. Modelling by the Government of Vietnam indicates that a rise in sea‐levels of one metre would inundate 39 per cent of the Mekong Delta (Miller & Dun, 2019: 133). In Bangladesh, discussion of climate change often triggers headline narratives asserting millions of future ‘climate refugees’, but these assumptions sometimes gloss over the complexities of detail about migration and livelihood decision‐making (Bernzen et al ., 2019).…”