Research Meetup 15 – Enhancing Flood Resilience and Sustainable Development in Vietnam
Enhancing flood resilience and sustainable development in Vietnam
Vietnam is ranked globally as the country with third highest exposure rate to flooding. Vietnamese cities experience severe floods every year, causing significant properties and public infrastructure damage, loss of business and livelihood options, contamination of water, and increase in water-related diseases. In Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city, flood risk is especially acute due to climate change, fast urbanization and an aging drainage system.
This talk presents the findings of the GCRF-OSIRIS project, which aims at mitigating the social and economic impacts of floods in Vietnam cities through the identification of cost-efficient, long-term investments in structural flood protection measures. The study, conducted in collaboration with Vietnamese stakeholders in government and academia, and with the involvement of local communities, blends methods from different disciplines (e.g., hydrology, meteorology, transport economics) to develop an optimization model which determines the schedule of flood mitigation projects minimizing road infrastructure damage and congestion in different flood scenarios. An important finding of the model application to the city of Hanoi was that using only 20% of the overall project costs would be sufficient to reduce both the damage and congestion rates by half.
Finally, one of the main merits of this study has been the enhancement of capacity-building support and multi-stakeholders partnerships in Southeast Asia, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Southeast Asia Operations Research Network (SEAORN), a platform for supporting OR growth and collaborations between academics and practitioners in the region.
Watch the recording of the session!
About Prof. Maria Paola Scaparra
Maria Paola Scaparra is a Professor of Management Science at the University of Kent Business School, UK. Over the years, Paola held several leadership roles within the school, including Associate Dean of Research and Innovation, Head of the Management Science Group and Programme Director for the MSc Business Analytics. Paola holds an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and a PhD in Mathematics Applied to Economic Decisions from the University of Pisa, Italy.
Paola is passionate about developing OR tools for solving intractable challenges in developing countries and contributing to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She has led several international, multi-disciplinary and consultancy projects, including projects funded by the British Academy, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Innovate UK. She is also a member of the General Council of the UK OR Society.