Why Rural Towns? 

Several rural regions and communities in Europe and Japan (as in other parts of the world) are now dealing with global crises or have to prepare to face them. These crises include global pandemics, political threats, refugee-related migration, economy-related rural depopulation, and environment-related climate change. To face them, communities in rural regions urgently require strategies to tackle those challenges. Resilience strategies are scattered and often based only on tangible and visible symptoms and indicators, whereby a lot of intangible yet crucial aspects are neglected. Also, those strategies tend to deal based on “one threat at a time”. Different organizations have provided resilient tools to deal with specific catastrophes or some specific dimensions (environment, socio-economic development, infrastructure, etc.). However, the few instruments allow looking at the vulnerability and vitality of rural communities holistically. Finally, when it comes to community resilience, many would not disagree with the statement that a significant focus has been put in recent years on larger cities and agglomeration. Without being ignored, rural communities still deserve some more attention while knowing that rural challenges are quite diverse from one region to another. For instance, rural communities in Japan sometimes seem different from those in Germany, and rural towns in Spain often deal with different priorities than those in Poland. Those differences are sometimes even significant between rural communities of the same region.

Why 3V?

Vitality, Vulnerability and Versatility. What makes a rural community vulnerable? What makes it full of vitality and ready to bounce back while meeting setbacks? How versatile should a community be to be resilient? The 3VRUT project wants to gather both the signs of vitality and vulnerability of rural communities while looking at the versatility of their resources to deal with the global crises affecting them.

Why Remote Sensing? 

Besides the traditional ways to observe the transformation of rural communities (as for field observation, socio-economic data collection, and feedback from community actors), remote sensing allows capturing some new information. Their use by public authorities and scientists has become more important over recent years. The technology has also developed, and discussion about the relevance of remote sensing data aims at providing some directions in detecting land issues. Of course, data gathered from remote sensing have its limits. Nevertheless, one may open a dialogue about these limitations and the new opportunities offered by remote sensing to grasp the challenges of rural communities better.

Main outcomes

• An integrated conceptualisation, methodology, and set of indicators to verify and validate the degree of vitality, vulnerability and versatility (3Vs) of rural towns using remote sensing, socio-economic data, telecommunication and mobile data, ground interviews and ethnography.

• A digital report for the local governments (in the local language) that integrates the 3Vs in the diagnosis of the selected rural towns, for them to make the necessary action plans to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.

• A series of statements about the vitality and vulnerability conditions of rural communities through the Publication publication of results in three leading journals and international conferences.

• A policy brief for discussions at the United Nations SDG Forum.

• A start-up of transnational collaboration on land management and geospatial sciences.

Methodology

The consortium members/researchers have conducted a series of research activities and tasks since the beginning of the project. Most of these tasks are related to the first step of the project, i.e. to the data gathering and indicator selection. Research activities conducted during that period (April 2021- May 2022) can be divided into three (3) stages:

●        the pre-methodological stage

●        the 3vrut indicators selection process stage (7 steps)

●        the fieldwork preparing stage

Support

The project “Assessment of Transformations in Vitality, Vulnerability and Versatility of Rural Towns (3VRUT)” is supported by EIG CONCERT-Japan initiative within the Framework of the Strategic International Collaborative Research Program (SICORP) under the 7th Joint Call of “ICT for Resilient, Safe and Secure Society” (2021–2024). Each team is financed by its National Agency. See the details in the Team page.