Due to climate chane, the frequency and scale of flood events in Vietnam is increasing dramatically. Frequent floods have a clear adverse impact on the country’s ability to eradicate poverty and achieve sustainable development. The overarching aim of this project is to build a decision support tool for optimizing long-term investments in flood mitigation measures in Vietnam. Specifically, the project will focus on minimizing the impacts of flooding on road infrastructure in urban areas.

Research Objectives

1. Identify gaps and inefficiencies in current infrastructure investment and maintenance programmes, especially in relation to climate change and flooding issues that affect transport.
2. Build a set of future flood scenarios affecting the urban area under study with their associated probability of occurrence based on rainfall predictions, historical data and climate change projections.
3. Develop qualitative approaches to evaluate the impact of floods on local communities and the social benefit of avoiding flood damage to road infrastructure. Identify feasible flood-control measures and evaluate their cost and benefits.
4. Develop a multi-period optimisation model for strategic, long-term planning of mitigation actions which minimizes the impact of floods on urban road networks over different flood scenarios. Propose a set of economic and sustainable strategies for investing in flood avoidance and damage mitigation that are robust to climate change and rapid urbanization.
5. Apply the developed methodology to the City of Hanoi. Integrate the research results into future planning and interventions.