New approach to assess multi‐scale coastal landscape vulnerability to erosion in tropical storms in Vietnam

The increase of coastal erosion due to intense tropical storms and unsustainable urban development in Vietnam demands vulnerability assessments at different research scales. This study proposes (1) a new approach to classify coastlines and (2) suitable criteria to evaluate coastal vulnerability index (CVI) at national and regional/local scales. At the national scale, the Vietnamese coastline was separated into 72 cells from 8 coast types based on natural features, whereas the Center region of Vietnam was separated into 495 cells from 41 coast types based on both natural and socio‐economic features. The assessments were carried out by using 17 criteria related to local land use/cover, socio‐economic, and natural datasets. Some simplified variables for CVI calculation at the national scale were replaced by quantitative variables at regional/local scales, particularly geomorphology and socio‐economic variables. As a result, more than 20% of Vietnam’s coastline has high CVI values, significantly more than 350 km of the coasts in the center part. The coastal landscapes with residential and tourism lands close to the beaches without protection forests have been strongly affected by storms’ erosion. The new approach is cost‐effective in data use and processing and is ideal for identifying and evaluating the CVI index at different scales. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.