A land-use change model to study climate change adaptation strategies in the Mekong Delta

The rice-shrimp farming system is considered as a sustainable and beneficial model for the environment. However, the area of rice-shrimp was increasingly narrowed due to the trend of converting from rice to aquaculture by economic reasons. This paper aims to propose a medium scale land use change model for understanding the land use decision of farmers in adaptation to the environment and climate change. The model integrates a land-use decision making process based on multi-criteria selection where the main factors are land suitability, land convertibility, land use situation of neighbors, and profitability of land use patterns. Concerning the land use data, we used historical land use map in 2005, 2015 and 2019. Shrimp cultivation regions was completed by Landsat satellite image processing. The model has been calibrated by rice-shrimp map in 2015 and has been verified with the rice – shrimp map in 2019 of the My Xuyen district, Soc Trang province, Vietnam. The simulated results show that the rice-shrimp area was increasingly narrowed and has been converted to aquaculture land. In addition, the model tends to show that in a scenario of sea level rise of 15 cm in 2030, the share of rice-shrimp and shrimp tends to rise sharply, which is an important lesson for developing complex adaptive strategies of farmers.