Hanh Vu is the Director of Green Youth Collective and Refillables Dong Day community enterprises. She is the Founder of REED and REwild Vietnam. First and foremost, she is a mother, a life partner, a home maker, a practitioner and a community builder.
For almost 20 years, Hanh Vu has been learning and working across related sectors surrounding climate change and sustainability issues at multiple levels, from grassroots to international. For now, the journey has resulted in the ecosystem of community enterprises and working places that she has helped develop around Green Youth Collective since bringing it to Hội An in 2014, Green Youth Collective & Community-led Regenerative systems.
From economic flows to ecological limits
Hanh’s path into sustainability began with a (distinguished) degree in International Business Economics from Foreign Trade University.
The discipline gave her an early framework for understanding how resources are allocated, how value is created and captured, how incentives influence behaviour, and how trade and institutions connect decisions made in different places.
An international economic perspective also makes visible the relationships behind globalisation: materials move through supply chains; capital and products cross borders; environmental costs are often displaced from consumers to producing communities, ecosystems or future generations. What appears efficient within one business or transaction may create costs elsewhere that neither markets nor conventional accounting fully recognise.
Climate change widened this economic lens.
It raised a more fundamental question: what happens when an economy’s demand for materials, land and ecological services exceeds the capacity of living systems to provide and renew them?
This is central to global economic thinking. The Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity argues that economies are embedded within Nature rather than external to it—and that production, consumption and waste ultimately depend upon, and affect, the ecological systems that sustain them. The UNEP International Resource Panel reports that global resource extraction has tripled over the past five decades, with resource extraction and processing now responsible for more than 60 per cent of planet-warming emissions.
Seen in this light, Hanh’s later work in circular economy, Zero Waste, ecological restoration and regenerative tourism is an effort to work with the consequences that conventional economic systems often leave outside their boundaries.
Her understanding of the nature of economic systems, the global economic context, globalization, and urbanization helped Hanh shape her own perspectives on ecology and society—enabling her to approach and develop multidisciplinary expertise that moves from transactions to relationships; from resource efficiency to ecological limits; and from economic growth alone to the resilience of the communities and landscapes on which an economy depends.
Entering climate work as the field was emerging
She started professionally at a formative moment for climate action in Viet Nam.
The country had approved its first National Target Programme to Respond to Climate Change in December 2008. Significantly, the programme already recognised that climate change required a systemic, integrated and cross-sectoral response, alongside stronger institutions, human capacity and international cooperation (Government of Viet Nam, 2008). At around the same time, initiatives such as the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network began introducing shared-learning and multi-stakeholder approaches in Đà Nẵng, Cần Thơ and Quy Nhơn.
Hanh entered the field while its language, evidence and methods were still being developed in Viet Nam. From 2009 to 2014, she worked with Challenge to Change on urban climate resilience, youth initiatives, communications and narratives, disaster risk reduction and post-flood recovery.
These experiences revealed that a climate hazard never acts alone.
The effects of a flood or drought depend on land use, infrastructure, livelihoods, public services, access to information and the ability of institutions and communities to respond. A technically sound plan may still fail if local people cannot use it, if responsibilities are unclear or if the organisations involved do not work together.
Climate resilience therefore became a way of understanding change: conditions cannot be fully predicted; social and ecological systems influence one another; and the capacity to learn, coordinate and adapt is often as important as the original intervention.
The IPCC now expresses this through the concept of climate-resilient development—integrating adaptation and mitigation with sustainable development, supported by inclusive governance, diverse forms of knowledge, institutional capacity and coordinated action across society (IPCC, 2023).
One climate question, expressed through many fields
Seen through this frame, Hanh’s current work is an interconnected system involving related sectors and actors.
Agroecosystem and floodplain restoration strengthen the capacity of land to retain water, regenerate soil, support biodiversity and sustain livelihoods under increasingly variable conditions.
Zero Waste and circular systems address the other end of the same relationship: how materials are extracted, purchased, used and discarded—and how organic matter and other resources can be returned to useful local circulation.
Tourism is relevant because it is not simply an economic sector operating beside the landscape. In places such as Hội An, it shapes employment, purchasing, construction, land use, food systems, waste generation and the financial value assigned to local culture and nature. It can weaken these foundations or help invest in their continued care.
Green livelihoods and community enterprises provide the operating capacity between these fields. They create roles through which environmental responsibility can become practical work, local income, technical service and long-term stewardship—not only a short-lived project activity.
The connection running through all of them is therefore climate resilience in its deeper sense: strengthening the ability of a place to respond to environmental and economic change without losing its ecological foundations or community agency.
The capabilities this work demands
Such transitions cannot be delivered through technical knowledge alone.
They involve living systems, uncertain futures, competing interests and actors working with different incentives, language and authority. Conditions change while the work is underway. A solution that performs technically may fail socially, financially or institutionally.
A major review of sustainability education identifies eight interconnected capabilities required for this kind of work: systems, futures, values and strategic thinking, together with interpersonal, intrapersonal, implementation and integration competence. The authors emphasise that these capabilities must work together; knowing how to analyse a problem is not the same as being able to develop and implement a viable response collaboratively (Redman and Wiek, 2021).
Hanh researches unfamiliar problems, draws upon specialist knowledge and learns from both success and failure practice. She also works directly with farmers, waste workers, young people, tourism staff and community practitioners. She has gardened, composted, tested material flows, trained operational teams, managed enterprises, advised businesses, convened partnerships and worked with public institutions.
The hands-on experience is how she understands the system. Direct practice reveals what plans tend to hide: contamination in a material stream, the time required to change a routine, the true cost of operating a service, the knowledge held by frontline workers, or the point at which an apparently simple solution becomes unworkable.
Research helps interpret these observations. Collaboration brings in knowledge and resources that no individual holds. System design connects them into roles, services, infrastructure and relationships that can be tested. Implementation then produces new evidence—and the cycle begins again.
Working where the connection is missing
Many sustainability problems persist not because no solution exists, but because the actors holding different parts of the solution remain disconnected.
Research on sustainability transitions describes transition intermediaries as actors or platforms that connect different groups, skills, resources, experiments and technologies so that fragmented initiatives can begin to influence a wider system (Kivimaa et al., 2019).
Hanh’s work has gradually developed into this intermediary role, with an operational dimension. She does not only convene, advise or advocate. She and her teams also test, run and adapt parts of the system being proposed.
As she explained in an interview with Mekong Tourism:
“I don’t only do advocacy. I run the solution at the same time.”
Operating the solution makes advocacy more grounded. It reveals costs, behaviours, institutional barriers and unintended consequences. It allows partners to discuss something already visible in practice—and to identify what would be required for the next step to become possible. It also helps shape the expertise and science-based knowledge through real-life examples and community-grounded experiences.
Building the capabilities a place is missing
The organisations around GYC & Community-led Regenerative systems emerged through this process.
Green Youth Collective provides the community roots, long-term direction and space for developing the working models. REED builds technical services, operating systems and public–private–community partnerships. Refillables Đong Đầy, an independent ecosystem partner co-led by Hanh, specialises in upstream reuse and refill. REwild connects ecological and community practice with field learning, hospitality and regenerative tourism.
These organisations were not all planned from the beginning. Each developed as the work revealed a function that needed deeper knowledge, a different operating model or a more suitable institutional home.
This is what makes the case distinctive. Its significance lies in the continuity between roles: more than a decade of connecting community practice, enterprise operations, applied research and institutional partnership within one changing local landscape. The same person has been close enough to frontline implementation to understand its friction, while also working at the level of business models, destination systems, public policy and international collaboration. Making sure the diversity is respected and evolution takes place with alignment and coordination.
The ecosystem has continued through floods, droughts, COVID-19, organisational transitions and changes within the communities and people involved. Some experiments have ended. Others have evolved into services, partnerships, enterprises or working places.
Hanh’s and the ecosystem’s work is sustained by a deep sense of commitment, consistency, and resilience—holding a long-term responsibility to the role Hanh has defined for herself and for the communities she works with, especially in contexts where conditions are constantly shifting. It is a practice shaped by starting from the ground up, often from very limited resources, and from within the realities of local communities themselves, where progress is neither linear nor guaranteed, but must be continuously built, maintained, and re-earned over time.