The Challenges of Rapid Urbanization:

By 2050, the world’s population will have grown to about 10 billion people, with around 70 percent of them living in cities. This poses enormous challenges for infrastructure systems. Whether it is water or energy supply, waste or wastewater disposal, housing or food supply, time is of the essence to develop and implement sustainable structures, procedures, and solutions. An important prerequisite for this is to treat a given city and its surroundings as a cross-functional socio-economic and environmental unit, and to put the learnings gleaned from this integrated perspective into practice.

The Goal: Empowerment for Collaborative Thinking & Concrete Action

The emplement! team develops transferable methods, programmes, and concepts to foster the relevant players in a given city, and in the region to support them in turning overarching strategies and visions into efficient and sustainable measures.

The development of the tools and methods for empowering the actors takes place on three levels – system, technology, and implementation. The team then selects suitable technologies to aid in this development. When it comes to the third level – the implementation itself – emplement! identifies challenges and obstacles, and works on implementation procedures according to their research.

Implementation should be sustainable, i.e., technologies must be resource-efficient, scalable, emission-reducing. This subsequently contributes to the reduction of Greenhouse Gases Emissions. In the meantime, technologies must be financially sustainable and operational in the long term. Technologies and concepts for the four fields of action should contribute, among other things, to resilience against drought and flooding.

Research Activities in Đà Nẵng City and Quảng Nam Province

One area of focus for the emplement! project is the Vietnamese city of Đà Nẵng and the adjacent region Quảng Nam Province. Adapted to the needs of the area, the research activities concentrate on four action fields including tourism, agriculture and forestry, industry, and built environment.

The implementation process for infrastructure, e.g., Green Technologies or procedures/methods in the field of water, energy supply, wastewater, and waste disposal, are important aspects of the project. It is also crucial during this process to include aspects of sustainability and climate protection and to promote resilience by intensive collaboration in the urban-rural context.

For the definition phase, the emplement! team and participating actors have defined showcases that can be implemented as prototype projects within our four fields of action for the subsequent detailed scientific analyses.

For the R&D phase, implementation activities, i.e., pilot projects, will be conducted for four action areas of tourism, agriculture and forestry, industry, and build environment. Accordingly, the pilot projects are designed so that they can be networked with each other in a conceptual, technical, and transferable manner. The developed or adapted methods will be used to accompany and analyze the pilot projects in consideration of possible conceptual, technical, and trans-sectoral synergies. Technology setups for four action areas will also be developed and selected concerning their local context, scalability, and potential synergies between technology applications.

The project contributes to practical implementation processes, strengthening local competencies, and general implementation research. It also applies tools like questionnaires, obstacle analysis, summer schools and practical training. A toolbox will be created as a project result.

Who are the Actors?

City Planners, NGOs, University Representatives, Industry, Public, Local Administration, Ministries, Farmers

Examples:

Contribution to the development of sensitive/ecologically-compatible tourism
German-Vietnamese summer school program aimed at building upon ideas for a „Green river valley“ tourism and appreciation concept.

Enhanced measures for resource-efficient agriculture
Improvement measures and training units for farmers to aid in the sustainable utilisation of resources, fertilisers, and pesticides to set the basis for „safe food“ production

Development of action plans for industrial parks to improve sustainability
Implementation of a German management data collection tool analysing waste generation and safe disposal practices

Analyses of resource consumption and reduction options of buildings
Analysing buildings (offices, hotels) with respect to consumption (energy, water) and generation patterns (waste, wastewater) and the related potential for improvement