Likelihood of innovative construction techniques to build disaster resilience for vernacular housing in the highland of central Vietnam

Disaster mitigation for marginal communities has become one of the most significant development goals of the 21st century. Vietnam has been reported one of the five most vulnerable nations in the world to climate change and so serves as a useful case study in developing appropriate housing solutions after disasters. In addition, some local communities in remote mountainous areas of Vietnam still keep strong vernacular traditions in their housing, especially the typical timber house-on-stilt, which need intense consideration before employing any new techniques of disaster mitigation on them. Perceptions on how to develop a sustainable housing solution for such communities, therefore, is still controversial with very few useful options developed to date. The paper investigates the existing unsafe conditions of traditional houses of a local community in the central highland of Vietnam, exposed to natural disasters, together with an identification of several traditional features of this housing that would be needed to preserve in future construction. Some important gaps of these traditional houses in terms of disaster risk reduction are then displayed to show opportunities where new construction techniques have a high possibility to perform against extreme climate events.