Aaron Kingsbury

In response to the growing impacts of climate change, Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) offers an integrated approach to enhance productivity, resilience, and emission reduction. This study promotes CSA adoption among smallholder farmers in northern Vietnam’s mountainous region by documenting the implementation and early outcomes of a community-based CSA initiative and drawing lessons for future scaling. The project combined farmer training with technical and material support to apply CSA practices such as organic composting, efficient irrigation, agroforestry-based home gardening, intercropping, fruit tree cultivation, and biological pest management. Using a mixed-methods design, data was collected through preliminary surveys, citizen science–based monitoring via the ESRI Survey123 platform and follow-up interviews assessing changes in food security, income, labour and environmental conditions. Findings indicate that diversified home gardens integrating fruit trees, organic vegetables and composting improved household food security, diversified diets and increased income by 10%, while reducing women’s labour burden related to irrigation and forest gathering. The project also fostered stronger social cooperation, peer learning and a shift toward sustainable, market-oriented production systems. Overall, the study provides practical evidence to inform policies supporting farmer-led and community-based CSA initiatives, emphasising the importance of continuous capacity building, local market development and institutional support to scale climate-resilient agriculture across upland regions.

The Northern Mountainous Region of Vietnam, home to diverse ethnic minority communities, is increasingly vulnerable to climate change, particularly in the agriculture sector. Smallholder farmers face mounting challenges due to shifting temperature and rainfall patterns. This study examines how smallholder farmers in Thai Nguyen and Son La provinces perceive climate change and the factors shaping their adoption of Nature-Based Solutions (NbS). Using a mixed-methods approach, including household surveys, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions, farmers were found to recognise climate variability as a major driver of declining crop productivity and increased soil degradation. Despite awareness of the potential benefits of NbS, adoption remains limited due to financial constraints, insufficient technical knowledge and inadequate institutional support. However, findings highlight the value of integrating Indigenous knowledge and community-based initiatives into climate adaptation strategies. Context-specific policies, enhanced capacity building efforts and institutional mechanisms are recommended to promote the scaling up of NbS and strengthen the climate resilience of smallholder farming systems in Vietnam.

Disaster town watching comprises a participatory technique by a community to observe, identify, understand, and build resilience to natural or human-induced hazards. Participants walk through their communities, taking notes and imagery for subsequent participatory risk mapping exercises. The goal is to develop a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the community's state of disaster risk management. This article explores the integration of drones in the acquisition of imagery for disaster town watching. It followed standard practices for conducting disaster town watching research in a community in the Philippines. However, in addition to standard walking teams, one team learned to pilot drone missions, take aerial images, and then interpret them. The imagery they produced elicited more spatially significant relationships between and across features and locations in the community. The types of local knowledge identified differed significantly from that taken from images produced with cellular phones or Google Earth. This study revealed that drone imagery can provide new insights into local knowledge on hazards, vulnerability, and resources and the enhancement of social, economic, and environmental resilience it engenders. Participants build greater confidence in their ability to determine self-help solutions and mutual help countermeasures for enhancing disaster preparedness and community resilience against disaster.

Vietnam is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and impoverished ethnic minority groups in marginalized areas are more adversely affected. This article focuses on the Northern Mountainous Region (NMR) of Vietnam, which is the poorest region in the country. It employs a participatory case study approach in assessing the vulnerability of the three major ethnic minority groups in the region: (1) the Tay, (2) Dao, and (3) Hmong. The results show that each of the three groups is vulnerable to climate change in different ways. The Tay people are vulnerable to flooding, whereas the Hmong and Dao groups are vulnerable to droughts and cold snaps. This study provides valuable insights into the complex relationship between ethnicity and vulnerability. The vulnerability of specific communities in the study area to climate change impacts gets amplified due to their already existing vulnerabilities, which are accordingly determined by the complex links among culture, geography, poverty, marginalization, and the communities’ lack of access to resources and capital. This underscores the importance of looking beyond simplistic technical response measures; instead, policy and decision-makers need to address both climatic and non-climatic conditions, including the drivers of social vulnerability. Only through this amalgamation of approaches can planners develop measures that are flexible enough to incorporate and mitigate the existing and many “new” vulnerabilities emerging from rapidly evolving human–environment systems.

Land management is vital for agricultural production and ecosystem service maintenance to mitigate the effects of climate change. This is particularly important in regions with higher proportions of sloping land, where degradation is more prevalent. The mountainous northwest of Vietnam provides a salient example of an area with sloping and highly degraded soils. This article employed data envelopment analysis to investigate the effect of sustainable land management practices on efficiency and yield in the cultivation of oranges. Determinants of production efficiency and the interaction between efficiency and yield were also analyzed. Results indicate that 130 out of the studied 174 groves are not operating at optimal efficiency levels and that most producers would benefit by increasing their scale of production. Furthermore, the adoption of sustainable land management was found to improve production efficiency and yield both positively and significantly. Finally, the production efficiency of orange groves is positively affected by the ethnicity of the head of the farming household, access to extension services, and the degree of sustainable land management adoption. Farming households headed by members with higher levels of education and more farming experience were also found to significantly contribute to scale efficiency.

As COVID-19 has become more widespread in Vietnam, the government has taken preventative measures including mandating social distancing and closing brick-and-mortar businesses considered unessential. To maintain operations, many restaurants have converted their business models to providing delivery sales via online platforms. This article focuses on understanding exactly why customers order meals online from restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic and introduces a theoretical model for these developments centered on individual self-protective behavior as a response to the crisis. Request access from your librarian to read this article's full text.

Despite the burgeoning amount of tourism recovery research, there is a dearth of studies that explore communal coping. To address this gap, this study examined the communal coping of a tourism‐reliant community in Indonesia that was destroyed by a tsunami using the Participatory Research Action (PAR) paradigm. It employs Photovoice augmented with mobile data collection using Survey123 from ESRI. The findings identified three phases of communal coping: losing the daily routine, reviving routines, and living with new routines. Each of these was found to be pivotal to destination resilience building. This study offers a novel way to examine disaster experiences.

Over centuries, ethnic minority communities in the north of Vietnam have developed complex farming systems well-adapted to their environments. Much of this is based on indigenous knowledge concerned with adapting to locally-available resources and more recently enhancing resiliency to climatic risk. This article draws from data gathered with mixed qualitative methods in ten villages in rural Bac Kan Province in the north of the country. It documents specific examples in the production of banana and medicinal plants; maize and red peanut; taro, pachyrhizus, and maize; and green bean as systems that incorporate native crops in ways that provide resistance to drought, improve water-use efficiency, benefit the soil, minimize agrochemical use, preserve culinary traditions, support gender equality, and increase the incomes of farm families living near the poverty line. Overall, this study illustrates unique ways that indigenous knowledge and agroecological farming practices can increase social, economic, and environmental resiliency, mitigate risk, and strengthen livelihoods in marginalized communities. As communities across the Global South seek answers to ever-increasing challenges brought by changes in climate, this paper argues that policymakers should revisit, support, and promote the indigenous knowledge already present in these communities to advance more sustainable futures.

Disaster studies and tourism disaster research are emerging areas of academic inquiry that remain heavily reliant on traditional methods to gather qualitative data. Only recently have those in this field begun to explore more participatory methodologies, and their potential to generate knowledge. Yet, despite these developments, photovoice remains largely absent in research. This article focuses on the process, limitations, and benefits of this alternative approach, as discovered through a research project in tourism-reliant coastal communities in Banten Province, Indonesia, following a 2018 tsunami. In particular, research combined photovoice and ESRI Survey123 to examine how Banten residents perceived, experienced, and responded to the impacts of the tsunami, as well as their post-disaster coping strategies. Although challenged by reliance on participants having sufficient cell phone data plans, adequate phone signal strength, and the skill levels needed to complete the surveys, the method yielded a richer quality of data than traditional qualitative interviews. The process was also found to be both therapeutic and empowering for tsunami survivors. Overall, this method offers a fresh approach to understanding hazards and providing more nuanced theory-building of tourism disasters.