Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Professional Master in Urban Management

The extreme phenomena of the climate are inevitable and people have to find the ways to adapt to them in the future. Disaster preparedness and climate change adaptation are heavy duties that authorities have given a high priority in the annual agendas to ensure a better life for the people. With developing countries, where often weak of institutions and governance systems to solve the problem of population growth, inadequate infrastructure, and diminishing or already depleted natural resources, these challenges will be greater. Vietnam locates in the monsoon region near the equator so that experiences frequent storms, tropical cyclones year-round. In recent years, the frequency and severity of these events is increasing.With a long coastline, Vietnam is evaluated to be one of the highest vulnerable countries from sea level rise due to climate change. Being the poor and underdeveloped provinces, coastal cities in South-Central region of Vietnam face to many challenges in the process of urbanization and socio-economic development. The rising of sea levels causes widespread flooding, salt water intrusion, affecting agricultural production, causing risks to industrial and socio-economic infrastructure systems in future. Climate change is one of the new researchfields in the Vietnam in terms of both methodology and research tools due to the complexity of the global scale and extent, subjected of affected. Therefore, understanding and study of the impacts of climate change is a difficult and challenging task. To adapt to sea level rise due to climate change, authorities need to raise awareness about climate change and its impacts for civil servants and state employees. And land use planning is a basic tool in climate change adaptation strategy of coastal cities. By integrating local land use planning into sea level rise scenarios to forecast risk and adjust appropriately in the coming periods, we can reduce the negative effects and strengthening the capacity to cope the impact of climate change. It is also the common strategy to adapt to sea level rise due to climate change in all sectors and levels that coastal cities must concern today.

Project (M. Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2013