Socially inclusive adaptation pathways for the Mekong delta by Bramka Arga Jafino

About the project

Promotors/ supervisors: Dr. ir. JH (Jan) Kwakkel - TU Delft, Prof.dr. F. (Frans) Klijn - TU Delft and Deltares, Dr. ir. Marjolijn Haasnoot - Utrecht University and Deltares

Bramka's PhD research is aimed at developing socially inclusive adaptation pathways for an urbanised delta in An Giang province, Vietnam. His research explores how multi-temporal and multi-actor complexity can be explicitly addressed in developing adaptation pathways. For this purpose, he is developing a coupled hydrological/land-use model in order to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the pathways.

Adaptation planning should strive for not only maximizing welfare outcomes, but also ensuring equitable outcomes among affected people. Supporting equitable adaptation planning requires looking beyond only at aggregated indicators. In his study, Bramka evaluates the distributional outcomes of alternative adaptation policies under various scenarios to the profitability of rice farming in the Vietnam Mekong Delta. To do this, he has to explicitly account for multisectoral dynamics surrounding the agriculture sector. This is because adaptation policies and uncertain factors target different parts of the systems and interact in a non-linear way. Hence, when zooming in to just one sector (e.g., flood impacts to farmers profitability), the inherent interconnectedness between the different sectors in the system would be overlooked. He therefore develops an integrated assessment model encompassing multiple sectors, including inundation and sedimentation dynamics, soil fertility and nutrient dynamics, and behavioral land-use change and farming profitability. 

Publications

1. Jafino, B. A., Kwakkel, J., Klijn, F., Dung, N. V., van Delden, H., Haasnoot, M., & Sutanudjaja, E. (2021). Accounting for multisectoral dynamics in supporting equitable adaptation planning: A case study on the rice agriculture in the Vietnam Mekong Delta. Earth's Future, 9, e2020EF001939. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001939

2. Jafino, B. A., Kwakkel, J. H., & Taebi, B. (2021). Enabling assessment of distributive justice through models for climate change planning: A review of recent advances and a research agenda. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, e721. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.721

About Bramka Arga Jafino

Bramka is a PhD researcher at the Policy Analysis section of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. He studied industrial engineering in his bachelor and worked on an agent-based model for analysing Natural Gas Vehicle adoption in Jakarta in his final research. Following his interest in policy modeling, Bramka continued his study in TU Delft’s Engineering and Policy Analysis master programme where he worked on freight transport network criticality analysis for a World Bank project.

Contact information:

Bramka Arga Jafino