Strengthening climate resilience of urban regions in Central Vietnam through nature-based solutions for heat adaptation and air quality improvement
The GreenCityLabHuế project aims to create a more sustainable, resilient and greener future for the city of Huế. The focus is on adapting to impacts of climate change through nature-based solutions and green infrastructure. In a participatory co-learning and co-creation process, the project will generate knowledge, ideas and concrete proposals for the development of green and blue infrastructures in Huế.
The project has the overall objective to contribute to increasing and strengthening social and environmental resilience in Huế and the surrounding province by promoting nature-based solutions and green-blue infrastructure. Likewise, existing urban ecosystems and provided ecosystem services are to be improved and protected. The project places special emphasis on the active participation of local stakeholders, experts and other knowledge carriers such as citizens. The project explicitly aims to model the implementation of nature-based solutions at city level and in more detail at specific locations within the city, and to analyse their potential impacts on the basis of scenarios. With the participation of different stakeholders, best practice measures for policy recommendations will be derived. As a result, a scientifically validated city-wide development concept for blue-green infrastructure will be developed together with local decision makers.
Addressed Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations
Vietnam is one of the ten countries most affected by the impacts of climate change. Central Vietnam in particular regularly suffers from extreme heat waves, storms, heavy rainfall events and flooding. The city of Huế is undergoing an accelerating trend of urbanisation with increasing sprawl and densification of urban space. As a result, the already visible impacts of climate change are being exacerbated by an unfavourable urban structure with additional heat stress, deterioration of air quality and an increase in localised flooding.
However, unlike other Vietnamese metropolises, Huế has the opportunity and potential to trigger growth that focuses on sustainability and nature-based solutions. Huế can thus be a positive example for other cities in the region. The GreenCityLabHuế supports the city in doing so by generating knowledge and ideas on nature-based solutions for upcoming environmental challenges.
Focus Topics
Strengthening climate resilience
Modelling of nature-based solutions and blue-green infrastructure
Participation, co-learning and co-creation
Sustainable urban transformation
Heat adaptation and air quality improvement
Improving the urban quality of life
Research in Action
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Research Approach and Methods
In the GreenCityLabHuế project, actors from science, administration, politics and civil society work together in a transdisciplinary way. Thus, the project generates joint knowledge, ideas and specific proposals for the future use of nature-based solutions and the development of green and blue infrastructure and develops measures to increase urban resilience. In doing so, the GreenCityLabHuế uses the »Urban Learning Lab« approach by initiating co-learning and co-creation processes.
In this way, a shared vision for a greener, smarter and more liveable urban development in the city of Huế and the surrounding province is developed. For this purpose, scenarios are modelled that help to visualise future developments and to understand and evaluate their possible impacts. An important component in the creation of scenarios of future urban developments is the involvement of local stakeholders, such as decision makers, experts and representatives of civil society.
Expected Solutions and Innovations
Nature-based solutions are nature-inspired measures that use the ecosystem services provided by plants, soils and other natural elements to increase the sustainability and resilience of cities.
In urban areas, a key contribution to climate change mitigation is therefore to preserve existing green-blue infrastructure as much as possible and to improve the storage of carbon in soils and vegetation. Furthermore, soils and plants contribute to cooling the ambient air and improving the air quality. In urban neighbourhoods where it is not possible to restore or enhance green spaces, green roofs and facades can be used as green-blue infrastructure elements, as they replace ecological functions of green and open spaces on sealed and built-up areas.
The project supports Huế in improving the protection and qualification of the existing green-blue infrastructure and in including a sufficient supply of green-blue infrastructure when planning for renewing city districts or creating new ones.
Current Achievements
The GreenCityLabHuế project has made significant progress concerning the modeling of narrative scenarios for green-blue interventions in Huế (Vietnam). Based on a multi-layered Geographic Information System based approach, a special toolbox was developed to evaluate potential ways to expand green-blue infrastructure in Huế. In addition, GreenCityLabHuế assessed the impacts of green-blue infrastructure (GBI) on the supply and demand of ecosystem services. By modeling of the supply of ecosystem services compared with the spatially explicit population for both the status quo in 2019 and scenario of 2030, the scenarios show how the demand for green spaces will change in the near future.
GreenCityLabHuế initiated a series of discussion events with stakeholders and residents of the city. The results of these events were evaluated and key topics were identified that should be addressed in the development of policy recommendations. In addition, the planning and approval process for the “showcases” were developed in a design competition for green-blue infrastructures, which started to be implemented.
Currently, the project team is working on policy recommendations for the future development of green-blue infrastructure in Huế based on the previous results. The GreenCityVisionHuế, a strategy paper for the future development of the green-blue infrastructure in Huế, will be developed in the course of 2024 in consultation with relevant decision-makers.
In times of climate change, green-blue solutions are key for healthy cities, healthy for humans and other organisms counteracting heat waves or extreme floods. Developing land use alternatives actively including green-blue nature-based solutions such as in the Green City Lab Hue are corner stones for a participatory sustainable development, in the absolut last moment.
The GreenCityLabHue Project brings knowledge on green and blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions to Hue and Vietnam. It contributes to the preservation and enhancement of the city’s specific characteristics as the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam with its unique heritage, culture, and ecology, embedded in a beautiful landscape. In particular, the project provides new approaches and international techniques to innovate and diversify the methods of urban planning in Hue to realize the people’s dream of living in a green and sustainable city that is resilient against the impacts of climate change.
