The Geography of Climate Change Adaptation in the Vietnam Northern Mountains: A Quantitative Analysis for Intentions of Indigenous Ethnic Minorities Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Protection Motivation Theory (PMT)

Abstract

Indigenous ethnic minorities lived in the Vietnam northern mountains are increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards related to climate change. The paper uses a combination of structural equation modeling (SEM) and protection motivation theory (PMT) to examine the community’s intention to climate change adaptation in a case study of the Van Chan (Yen Bai, Vietnam). Six constructs are developed based on PMT to conduct a questionnaire surveying 243 local peoples: risk perception, belief, subjective norm, adaptation assessment, production habits, and adaptation intention. SEM is implemented to extract three factors and to quantify the relationship between the factors related to protective behavior and those to the adaptation intention of the surveyed group. A 500 bootstrap sample is randomly selected from the original sample to estimate the coefficients and standard errors. The results show that structural models of the climate change adaptation intention for a district level and four communities of the Kinh, Thai, Tay and Mong. The results show that these communities pay more attention about the effectiveness of the adaptation actions to improve community resilience. The intention to implement adaptation measures to climate change do not depend to a large extent on the risk perception of climate change impacts. The analysis of the multi-group structure shows that these results differ among the ethnic groups.