Improving environmental monitoring plan for Thua Thien-Hue coastal zone, Vietnam

This study is to propose relevant improvements for existing monitoring strategy ofThua ThienHue coastal zone in Vietnam. Thua Thien-Hue coastal zone, and its Tam Giang-Cau Hai lagoon in particular, is known as the largest brackish water system in South East Asia. It has highly important environmental and economic roles. The lagoon provides valuable habitat of diverse and sensitive aquatic ecosystem. Moreover, because of its favourite geographic locations and natural conditions, this coastal zone has to support a range of economic activities, such as fisheries and aquaculture, tourism along with some agriculture, industry and shipping, most of which are resource-based activities. On the other hand, Tam Giang-Cau Hai lagoon is subject to far complex and unstable hydrodynamic and morphological processes. Due to the combination of all these drivers, this region undergoes undesirable changes and degradation, which seriously threat the local sustainable development. Therefore, an Integrated Coastal Zone Management (lCZM) program has been developed for Thua Thien-Hue coastal zone in order to response to emerging threats. In particularly, monitoring has been gained much attention due to its key function as provision of data and information for other actions of whole ICZM cyclic process taking place. However, in order to have a truly effective monitoring program, an integrated assessment must be carried out to revise the critical needs for monitoring. In order to do so, DPSIR (DriverPressure- State-Impact-Response) conceptual model is applied, covering major issues of local concern, such as growing population, agriculture, fisheries and aquaculture, tourism and sea level rise. The output of the assessment is a set of environmental and social indicators, which are, in fact, needs for monitoring. Besides, the eXIstmg monitoring strategy is further improved by statistically revising the efficiency of sampling locations, replicates and frequency