Environmental Information Portals for Local Stakeholders: Lessons Learned from Different Projects in Asia

Kurzfassung

In the “Water-related Information System for the sustainable Development of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam“ project, an internet-based information system was built to support integrated water, land and coastal resource management. The system was deployed on servers in Ho Chi Minh City and was officially handed over to Vietnamese institutions in early 2013 at the Mekong Environmental Symposium. Based on the experiences gained during 6 years of work in Vietnam, the River Delta Information System is currently being adapted for stakeholders in the Yellow River Delta. In this delta, the challenge lies in finding an equilibrium between resource exploitation (oil, gas, industry, agriculture) and protection of the natural environment (wetlands, bird migration grounds). Within the context of the Sino-German DELIGHT project (Delta Information System for Geoenvironmental and Human Habitat Transition), a large group of researchers is currently working on answering applied environmental research questions from the fields of hydrology, ecology, etc., by means of intensive field work, remote sensing based change detection approaches, modeling, and socio-economic surveys. All findings will be – as maps, reports, statistics, etc. – integrated into the DELIGHT information system, which will be jointly designed with and supplied to local stakeholders in the delta. This talk gives you the chance to see how the system looks from the users’ point of view, and how the system supports local stakeholders in their management tasks. It will give you an insight in cultural and technical challenges of implementing an online GIS system in countries like Vietnam or China. This talk also presents experiences starting from the user requirement analysis, the development process, trainings and evaluation in Vietnam, to the beginning of adapting the system for another project.