Building Capacity for Disaster Management for the Mountainous region of Da Bac district, Hoa Binh Province, Vietnam

With climate change, Vietnam is increasingly affected by natural hazards. In mountainous terrains, increased precipitations, combined with land use change and population pressure, induce the occurrence of slope instabilities. These landslides generate large, although poorly documented, impacts on the lives and livelihoods of rural populations. This project aim at going beyond the traditional scientific assessment of landslide hazards, by implementing participatory methods for real-time documentation of the occurrences and impacts of landslides jointly with local communities and co-design suitable disaster risk reduction practices adapted to the local context. In practice, the project will aim at: 1. Developing a network of geo-observers reporting hazards and impacts in their community; 2. Documenting the economic impacts from landslides and generate economic risk maps; 3. Identifying existing and potential disaster risk measures; 4. Developing teaching and research capacities in citizen science, GIS and landslide DRR within the Vietnamese partners and 5. Develop a stakeholder network steering the project activities and translating scientific findings into policy-relevant recommendations.