Water and Climate Services for Transboundary Water Management and Natural Disaster Risk Management

Space borne information is rapidly gaining ground for many applications, including communication, GPS, early warning, monitoring purposes, flood prevention, weather forecasting etc. The Netherlands is known for developing such applications, especially in the application of space borne information for land observation. Currently, Vietnam is developing broad programmes in this sector and is mainly cooperating with Japan, France and Belgium. Dutch companies are interested to link to these programmes with their added value in application development.

In Vietnam, the water and climate sector is a promising field for cooperation due to the severe impacts by typhoons, natural disasters (floods and droughts), soil subsidence, climate change impacts and projected sea level rise. Actually Viet Nam has also to deal with many impacts that relate to cross border interventions, like hydropower dams, increasing irrigated areas, flood spills, water retention, obstruction of fish migration and reduced sediment load. Obviously, due to the magnitude of the problems as well as the huge land surface that should be monitored, space borne information can significantly improve decision making, planning and policy development.

This G2G project will focus on knowledge transfer, building innovative (hydrologic) models, find financial solutions through external funding, business development & business partnerships and cooperation with other leading space agencies like NASA and JAXA.

Netherlands Space Office (NSO) has been commissioned to carry out the project.