Friday – 17 March 2023
Ho Huu Loc (Josh) (left) and Edward Park (right)
Dr. Ho Huu Loc, a faculty of Water Engineering and Management contributed his viewpoint to the article “Adaptation for changing deltas” recently published by “One Earth” journal under the March 2023 Issue. Having an impact factor of 14.944, One Earth One Earth is Cell Press’ flagship sustainability journal that provides a home for high-quality research and perspectives that significantly advance our ability to better understand and address today’s sustainability challenges. Dr Loc’s article explores the opportunities and the barriers to adaptation for delta communities facing unprecedented change in the future. Deltas have provided fertile farmland, productive fishing, and access to trade routes for millennia. Today, more than five hundred million people live on deltas and coastal urban areas. Yet deltas are also incredibly vulnerable to the pressures of climate change. Dr. Loc contributed to the issue with a strong push for the utilization of different Nature-based solutions (NBS) to protect delta dwellers.
The negative impacts to delta dwellers including salinity intrusion (SI) are exacerbated by climate change-induced sea level rise and the ground elevation fall due to exploitive uses of groundwater. Being a NBS and Ecosystem services expert, Dr. Loc proposed that NBS can create opportunities, both in mitigating the environmental stressors and improving the deltas’ ecosystem services as they have drawn huge traction worldwide, including a spot in global agendas like COP27.
The NBS will provide co-benefit which can simultaneously reduce climate change impacts, tackle biodiversity loss, enhance food security, and thereby protecting delta dwellers’ livelihoods.
Moreover, three barriers must be urgently addressed to effectively scale up NBS practices:
- NBS must be agriculturally based and self-sustained by generating real income for farmers.
- We need consolidated standards to precisely label practices as NBS to avoid “greenwashing” where parties with vested interest misleadingly pose their projects solely for funding purposes while depriving local people and harming biodiversity.
- Given its early stage, NBS needs more ground-based evidence via intensive monitoring and evaluation efforts before it can become globally approved.
The article was published in Volume 6, Issue 3 of One Earth and can be accessed through following:
