Asia’s mega-deltas are particularly vulnerable to multiple hazards influenced by environmental and climatic drivers such as storm surges, sea-level rise, subsidence, salinity intrusion, precipitation, and temperature changes. Socio-economic factors, including economic activity, urbanisation trends, land-use change, lifestyles, and demographics, also impact development targets at various levels, e.g., local, sub-national, and national levels…

Our “dream team” of researchers traveled to Nhon Hoi Commune, An Phu district in An Giang province in the Mekong Delta from May 27th to May 29th to conduct participatory research activities with young and older people. Our team consists of two coordinators and four student researchers from An Giang University and two community researchers based in Nhon Hoi. The team has spent the past two months doing online training on different research methods including oral history interviewing and participatory mapping…

The Community Science subgroup aims to work alongside delta communities to understand how their local surface water environments have and are changing. It is hoped activities such as photography and water quality monitoring will be fun, engaging and empowering for communities to inform on sustainable water management…

“All models are wrong, yet some are useful” is the mantra than many modellers live by. By starting out with the acknowledgement that we are never truly going to be able to accurately represent all the interactions and processes defining a system’s state of being, we can work to ensure that the models we do develop and design capture the relevant behaviours…

After a long hiatus in conducting fieldwork owing to the challenges presented by COVID-19, the team at Jadavpur University could finally embark on field visits in January 2021 and March 2021. In this blog, I share my reflections from the two field visits to the Indian Sundarban delta.

In Asia’s mega-deltas, coherent policies and strategies are crucial to achieve the sustainable development goals of the UN’s Agenda 2030 (SDGs). Ensuring coherence entails understanding how SDG targets interact. Delta actors can make the most use of resources if they understand which among the targets could aid or impede the implementation of others…

The first week of March 2021 saw the Living Deltas Hub Digital Annual Meeting take place. Long forgotten were the plans to be in Vietnam enjoying the sights of Phu Quoc and instead Hub members joined over zoom from bedrooms, living rooms and other nooks and crannies of their homes to come together to share progress and plans…

An assumed synergy between sustainable futures for deltas as socio-ecological systems, and the SDGs as a framework for those futures, is posited in much recent research on deltas. It could also be said to be coded into the DNA of the Living Deltas Hub itself - so that we sometimes use these ideas of sustainable delta futures, and SDG localisation to deltas or SDG realisation in deltas, interchangeably. However, this blog asks whether alignment between the SDGs and what we might call the delta social-ecological system (SES) approach can be taken for granted.

The Red River Delta (Đồng Bằng Sông Hồng in Vietnamese) in Vietnam has a long symbiotic relationship with the people that have lived there since the Bronze Age. Since 2004, UNESCO has designated the Red River Delta a ‘Biosphere Reserve’ given its special status as an area of outstanding biodiversity…

What is it with bees that they catch people’s imagination? We love their honey, marvel at their social organisation and revere them for their role in pollinating so many of the foods on which we depend. And here am I, writing my first Living Delta’s blog entry from the Creative Representations subgroup in WP1 and talking about bees! How has this come about and what have these incredible little insects got to do with the culture of the deltas and their long-term sustainability?

The Living Deltas Hub is deepening its productive relationships with state and civil society stakeholders in Vietnam’s Red River Delta. On the 25th and 29th January 2021, WARECOD, the Vietnamese Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), a local partner of the Living Deltas Hub promoted the Hub research programme to Vietnam Rivers Network (VRN), and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE)’s Department of Climate Change…

The lockdown in India owing to COVID-19 began on March 24, 2020 with March 22, 2020 declared as a curfew day. The State of West Bengal decided to shut schools and educational institutions from March 16, 2020 and has been under subsequent lockdown since March 24, 2020 which now will continue till May 3, 2020.

During our scoping visit along the Bangladesh coast in 1 B.C. (Before Covid), we came across a mangrove plantation in Kakrabunia village, Dacope upazila. This was the first time I’d encountered a mangrove forest. Before then, I’d only ever seen them in David Attenborough’s documentaries, or imagined them from reading academic papers. The moment was bittersweet. This little mangrove plantation represented that which had been lost, and an aspiration to reverse the damage done…

Deltas in the Anthropocene (open access) presents evidence from deltas in Africa and Asia on climate change, migration, adaptation, and shares sustainable gender-sensitive recommendations for management in a time when human influence on the natural environment is ever more apparent…

Between Oct 28th and Nov 4th 2020, VNU-CRES research team working on WP4 "Delta-level interventions to respond to and mitigate against foreseeable coastal system tipping points" tested survey tools in three study sites in Hai Phong, Thai Binh and Ninh Binh provinces in the Red River Delta of Vietnam.

Heather Moorhouse and Lucy Roberts represented the Living Deltas Hub at the virtual conference CitSci India, in September 2020. The conference was organised by the Biodiversity Collaborative, an organisation of multiple institutions whose aim is to promote biodiversity in India and its benefits to sustainable development and well-being through citizen science. Citizen science is an ever-growing tool in helping promote conservation and environmental education…

June 18-21, 2020, the UKRI GCRF Living Deltas Hub project team together with the students from Service-Learning - Building Green Community course, students major in Natural Resources and Environment Management participated in data collection in Ba Tri and Thanh Phu Districts, Ben Tre Province. It aims to collect relevant information on the impact of climate change on the livelihoods and health of the households…

Cyclone Amphan struck the Bay of Bengal on 21st of May 2020 causing extensive flooding of cultivated land across the Ganges and Brahmaputra delta. We are still discovering the extent of the damage and misery caused by the cyclone, but we already know that Amphan is another devastating example of coastal flooding which has become more extensive and prolonged since the mid 20th century…

From the 7th to the 10th of March 2020 – the WP4 was on scoping visit in the Bangladesh Delta. This was a great chance to discover in a few days the main challenges of the delta. We had also more time to meet each other and to discuss while on the way to the field. The scoping visit was organized by Anisur Majumdar (BUET)…

Just before the Covid-19 outbreak occurs, on the 9th of March 2020, our WP4 team had the chance to go to Bangladesh for a scoping trip in Satkhira division in the Bengal GBM delta. As time is flowing, we’d like to share with you our experience. While discovering and meeting the community of the Dumuria village in the Gabura Union, located on the opposite bank of the Sunderbans.