THE CONSEQUENCES FOR HUMANS

More than 20 million people live the vast maze of rivers, swamps and islands that make up the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. Predicting what the future could hold for them – in an area vulnerable to fast and dramatic change due to both manmade and natural events – is critical for their long-term wellbeing and livelihoods.

Over half of Vietnam’s rice production comes from the Mekong Delta, and it’s the country’s most important fishing region. With millions of people relying on the delta, the impact of climate-exacerbated storms, flooding and salinity increases is set to be enormous.

Craig Hutton, Professor of Sustainability Science, is focusing his work on understanding the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable rural populations. He said: “My interest is around bringing in the socio-economic component into models of different plausible future scenarios – trying to understand how wellbeing might be impacted, and how environmental change affects agriculture, livelihoods and poverty. We’re trying to develop storylines of plausible futures.”

One example the team in which Craig is a member has analysed is rice crops that are grown on the delta. Farmers can grow one, two or three crops a year, but the more crops they grow the more fertiliser is needed and the more the land needs to be irrigated. The result is a decline in the profitable productivity of the land, and exhausted soil.

“The choice is about making money quickly, or farming in a more sustainable way,” explained Craig. “Climate change plays straight into that, adding a whole layer into that argument for sustainable land management. But climate change is not on its own – human systems are interacting with natural systems, stressing them and changing them. The context is broad and it’s complex.”

Working with the team led by Professor Steve Darby and with Dr Hal Voepel, as well as partners across the UK and Vietnam, Craig has led work with stakeholders in Vietnam to visualise how agriculture might be practiced in the future and how sustainable those land use practices might be. This work will be supported by systems dynamics models, which are effectively flow diagram models that interconnect and influence each other in complex ways.

Craig has worked with systems dynamics approaches before, working with a Southampton-led team and the Bangladeshi government on plotting plausible scenarios of future states for the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100, a multibillion-dollar strategy to protect Bangladesh’s delta coast.

“We worked with their General Economics Division to model different coastal interventions for them, to see what would be the impacts on flooding and subsequent agricultural yield and poverty of building coastal protection walls, or planting defensive mangroves, for example,” said Craig. “We mapped the plausible impacts on agriculture and livelihoods under different climate change futures, and we were able to provide them with a lot of information and guidance.”

A similar system dynamics model is now in development for Vietnam and the first project to employ it will be a new project with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) (outlined on page 8).

Craig concluded: “The point of all this is to produce policy-relevant tools – to produce something that helps policymakers think about how to manage their systems. We’re not there to tell them what to do – we’re there to show them the consequences of their choices.”

Workers employed in sand mining repair infrastructure used for pumping sand out of the Mekong River