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Household social vulnerability to natural hazards in the coastal Tran Van Thoi District, Ca Mau Province, Mekong Delta, Vietnam

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Abstract

The large-scale land use transformations since the 1990s in the Mekong Delta have had significant impacts on socio-economic conditions and livelihoods of local residents, potentially affecting their vulnerability to coastal hazards. This study presents an assessment of social vulnerability of households in the coastal Tran Van Thoi District of the Ca Mau Province, the lowest part of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. The data of 21 socio-economic variables was extracted from a survey of 405 households and analyzed. The proposed household vulnerability index (HVI) is based on a Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which reduces the selected variables into seven independent factors. Results highlight the significant influence of some initial variables, especially education, income and housing quality, in the variation of the aggregated HVI. Households active in the agriculture and aquaculture are not significantly different in term of social vulnerability, whereas households working in the trade and service sector, or as temporary employees, are characterized by a significantly higher vulnerability. The coastal communes concentrate a higher proportion of vulnerable households, in agreement with the socio-economic statistics of these communes. It highlights the necessity to invest in priority in the enhancement of socio-economic conditions of these vulnerable groups for effective vulnerability reduction plans in the study area.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to greatly thank (1) the Belgian Technical Cooperation and VLIR-UOS for their financial support for this research; (2) the local people and staff in Ca Mau, who participated in our research and offered substantial information and statistics. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and instructive comments, which helped to improve our manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Earth System Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Hanh Tran & Matthieu Kervyn

  2. Faculty of Surveying, Mapping, and Land Administration, Hanoi University of Mining and Geology, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Hanh Tran

  3. Department of Biology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Quoc Nguyen

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  1. Hanh Tran
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Correspondence to Hanh Tran.

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Tran, H., Nguyen, Q. & Kervyn, M. Household social vulnerability to natural hazards in the coastal Tran Van Thoi District, Ca Mau Province, Mekong Delta, Vietnam. J Coast Conserv 21, 489–503 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11852-017-0522-8

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