Livelihood Strategies of Coastal Farmers Under the Context of Climate Change: A Case Study in the Coastal Areas of Thai Binh Province, Vietnam

Climate change, along with its negative effects, leads to a wide-range of complications, especially for coastal communities. Thai Binh is a coastal province located in the Red River Delta of Vietnam and has been directly affected by the adverse effects of nature. This chapter focuses on the core issues regarding the livelihoods of coastal farmers in the context of climate change. The results show that, in the context of vulnerability to climate change, different levels of government, from central to local, have applied different adaptation solutions. At the household scale, households have livelihood strategies to cope with the short- and long-term effects based on the available resources of the household and the predictions of future changes. International experience and lessons from Thai Binh province provide suggestions to policymakers, which include having development orientation toward commodity production, helping coastal people participate in sustainable development, and finding more effective ways into value chains, thus diversifying people’s livelihoods. Vocational training and increasing the transfer of technical advances to coastal farmers, together with doing good agricultural and coastal extension work and providing timely market information to the people, are the keys to helping farmers adapt well and sustainably to the challenges of climate change.