Starting in August 2018, this project has aimed to situate current responses to climate change within a broader temporal and spatial context of water hazards management, socio-economic development, and agrarian change. It builds on research that identifies differential vulnerability to climate change as a function of primarily social rather than physical factors (WIREs Climate Change 2019).

Specifically, this work asks: How is vulnerability to climate change socially and spatially distributed in the Lower Mekong Delta? How do climate change programs intervene in this landscape of vulnerability and with what effects? Do climate change adaptation measures reduce vulnerability to climate change-related hazards? To address these questions, we investigate how the active construction of water infrastructure and implementation of agricultural diversification projects affect people’s exposure and sensitivity to environmental hazards in the coastal region over time. We find that contemporary environmental vulnerability is a function of both past landscape interventions and actively unfolding climatic change (Climate and Development 2019). Despite growing appreciation for historical underpinnings of present-day vulnerabilities, prevailing approaches to socio-ecological hazards are too often synchronic and reductive (Environmental Scientist 2019), thus leading to the omission of important drivers of human vulnerability and migration (Annals of the AAG 2022). This work has been supported through a Multi-Country Research Fellowship by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC 2019), a grant from the Institute for Human Geography, and a U.S. Scholar Fellowship from the Fulbright Program.