On the night of November 19, 2025, the Đa Nhim hydropower plant repeatedly announced increases in flood discharge, at times exceeding 2,000 cu.m per second, causing severe flooding in downstream areas. — VNA/VNS Photo Nguyễn Dũng

Trần Như

HÀ NỘI — Experts and officials have called for faster digital transformation and technological innovation to improve the safety and management of more than 7,000 dams and reservoirs nationwide, as extreme weather and ageing infrastructure pose growing risks.

At a forum on “Digital transformation and technology application in operating and ensuring the safety of dams and water reservoirs”, organised by the Department of Water Resources Works Management and Construction and the Nông nghiệp và Môi trường (Agriculture and Environment) newspaper, speakers said Việt Nam must urgently modernise its systems to cope with worsening floods and climate challenges.

At the forum, Vũ Minh Việt, deputy editor-in-chief of the Agriculture and Environment newspaper, recalled the recent severe flooding in the central region, Khánh Hòa, Đắk Lắk, and historic inundations in many northern provinces. He said the unusual changes in rainfall and flow have placed far greater pressure on the reservoir system – previously considered the “flood shield”. This requires accurate and timely public information and a fundamental shift in how reservoirs are operated during emergencies. Digital transformation and scientific-technological applications are identified as breakthrough solutions.

Reservoirs have long played a crucial role in agricultural irrigation, domestic water supply, downstream protection, and socio-economic development. However, after decades of use, many have deteriorated, lack monitoring equipment, have no standard operating procedures, and have inconsistent technical data between localities.

According to the Department of Water Resources Works Management and Construction, the country has more than 7,300 irrigation reservoirs, but most are small or medium-sized and managed locally; only 30 per cent have emergency response plans, 9 per cent have undergone safety assessments, and 19 per cent have monitoring equipment. Around 900 reservoirs have relatively complete databases, although the national data system has been in place since 2016.

Phan Tiến An, head of the Reservoir and Dam Safety Division (Department of Water Resources Works Management and Construction), said many localities still manage reservoirs using Excel or fragmented documents, meaning information is not updated continuously, cannot be shared, and causes major difficulties during floods. The lack of rain-gauging stations, monitoring equipment, and reliance on experience-based forecasting increase operational risks.

According to An, the biggest challenge is the lack of complete technical data and a unified technology system. Although a reservoir database has been developed since 2016, only about 900 reservoirs have been fully updated. Local management remains manual, fragmented, and unconnected; many reservoirs lack rain-monitoring stations, and observation data are unstable. In addition, climate change has led to intense rainfall and flooding, narrowed flood-discharge space, and complicated joint reservoir operation due to insufficient data-sharing between irrigation and hydropower.

Speakers sharing their opinions at the forum in Hà Nội on Friday. — VNS Photo Trần Như

An said that to overcome this, the irrigation sector must accelerate digital transformation, improve institutional frameworks, issue unified standards for databases, monitoring, and operation software, and require all localities to use standard API-connected software.

The sector needs to invest in or lease IoT monitoring services, develop automatic warning systems, and apply artificial intelligence to rapidly analyse rainfall and flow data and support real-time operation. Adding economic-technical norms for technology items will help localities plan budgets and implement synchronised operation.

When data are standardised and decision-support technologies are widely applied, reservoir operation will be safer and more timely amid increasingly harsh climate conditions.

Sharing the same concern about data limitations, Nguyễn Văn Mạnh, head of the Science and Technology Division (Institute of Irrigation Planning), said there must soon be solutions to develop a large, shared database.

Models such as MIKE NAM, HEC-HMS, Mike11, Mike Flood and HEC-ResSim are used to forecast rainfall–runoff and simulate reservoir operation, supporting flood warnings for major structures such as Cửa Đạt, Ngàn Trươi and Tả Trạch. However, forecasting quality still depends largely on rainfall data and expert experience, while many models are outdated and need upgrading to match climate change.

In addition, the sector needs to standardise data nationwide, such as project-station identifiers, unified data models, measurement units, metadata, and common exchange formats from ministry to province and management units.

“We also need to modernise calculation tools supporting reservoir operation, promote AI and data-transmission technologies in all weather conditions, and continue improving forecasting quality by integrating AI into rainfall forecasting. Alongside that, we must strengthen training, technology transfer, international cooperation, and link meteorological-hydrological databases to the irrigation sector’s digital infrastructure,” Mạnh proposed.

At the forum, Hồ Sỹ Tâm (Thuyloi University) introduced a rapid risk-assessment system for small and medium-sized reservoirs using the DRAPT tool, part of the Việt Nam – New Zealand Dam Safety Project. The tool helps assess current conditions, evaluate downstream impacts, simulate design spillway scenarios, and identify risks, thereby creating a prioritised inspection list for a large number of reservoirs. DRAPT has been applied to nearly 150 dams in Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh and is being expanded to Quảng Bình, Huế and Đắk Lắk.

Hà Ngọc Tuấn, country representative of Weather Plus in Việt Nam, presented a decision-support system for reservoir operation developed by his organisation and partners. The system aims to support reservoir managers in decision-making during extreme rain and floods, especially in the northern and north-central regions, which have recently endured multiple storms and tropical depressions.

Focusing on the Chu – Cả river basin with a total reservoir volume of about 1.6 billion cu.m, including major reservoirs such as Cửa Đạt and several medium and small hydropower reservoirs, Tuấn said the challenge is to ensure dam safety while minimising downstream flooding risks.

He stressed that traditional operation based on a single downstream control point is no longer suitable under climate change and shifting rainfall patterns. The new trend is to monitor upstream water levels and inflows simultaneously and calculate in real time to determine optimal pre-flood water levels for each reservoir.

Participants at the forum agreed that data standardisation and digital transformation are no longer optional but mandatory to reduce risks and ensure safety for millions of downstream residents. When data are interconnected and technology is applied synchronously, the reservoir system will be operated more safely, flexibly and efficiently in the face of increasingly extreme weather. — VNS