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ViWaT Engineering overcomes its challenges in corona times
In times of social distancing, important meetings need to transition to an online format and fieldwork may need to be delayed. An international project like ViWaT is well equipped to handle the change from physical to digital meetings, as evidenced by the numerous successful conferences and workshops held in the past months.
On June 25, the project partners from the Institute for Water and River Basin Management from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT-IWG), the Vietnam Academy for Water Resources (VAWR), the Southern Institute of Water Resources Research (SIWRR) and VTT presented the current status of their work and their progress since the last meeting in January. Most progress happened in the field of numerical models and laboratory work, which could be carried out without being influenced by the current situation. The joint fieldwork in the Mekong Delta had to be postponed to the fall.
Five days later, the ViWaT-Engineering team organised an online workshop for 33 representatives from the ViWaT-Engineering project, the Vietnamese National Center for Water Resources Planning and Investigation (NAWAPI) and the Federal Office of Geology and Natural Resources (BGR). The participants discussed the impact of the pandemic on the current and future project work, and possible solutions. This concerns in particular the installation of monitoring stations to monitor land subsidence processes and groundwater and surface water quality dynamics within the project area. Furthermore, the participants discussed which contents and topics from the fields of coastal protection and sustainable water supply could be relevant for future projects and cooperation.
On July 13, another video conference took place with 14 participants from the ViWaT-Engineering project, NAWAPI, and the BGR. The discussion focused on the progress made in the development of a groundwater model and on establishing monitoring stations in Ca Mau Province in the southern Mekong Delta. The latest virtual meeting took place on July 27, where German ViWaT-Engineering project partners met with representatives from NAWAPI to discuss a future cooperation in the field of alternative water supply.
Continuing an international project in corona times inevitably has its challenges, but by frequently holding virtual meetings between the project partners and actively discussing impacts of the pandemic and possible solutions, the ViWaT project manages to overcome most of the obstacles.