Floodplain agro-ecosystem restoration · Closed-loop farming · Agroecology · Learning hub · Village-based hospitality
Where restoration becomes a way of life. Location: Cam Phu village, Go Noi, a neighbouring connected floodplain landscape and culture with Hoi An heritage town.
Tree planting is only one part of restoration. The deeper work is rebuilding the conditions that allow land—and the people caring for it—to continue.
REwild Land restoration farm brings this work together across two nearby areas in Cẩm Phú village, Gò Nổi: a river-facing community restoration site and a working farm.
One focuses on recovering ecological function. The other reconnects restoration with cultivation, food, learning and an emerging village-based hospitality economy. Together, they explore a larger question: can caring for a changing floodplain become part of how a village sustains land, knowledge and livelihoods?
A farming village shaped by water
Cẩm Phú lies within Gò Nổi, a floodplain landscape formed by the Thu Bồn River. Water has always structured life here.
Seasonal floods can bring sediment and renewed fertility, but they can also inundate fields, erode riverbanks and damage young vegetation. The dry season brings the opposite pressure: intense heat, rapid moisture loss and stress for plants trying to establish on exposed land.
Farmers have long adapted their cultivation to this changing cycle. Climate change, less predictable weather, land-use pressure and changing livelihood expectations are now making that relationship harder to maintain. Across Vietnam’s Central Coast, climate assessments identify increasing exposure to extreme heat, flooding, storms and drought, with growing consequences for ecosystems and rural livelihoods (World Bank, 2022).
Cẩm Phú is also entering a tourism transition. The village was formally recognised as a tourism destination in 2022. Its farms, river, bamboo groves, food and village culture create possibilities for community-based tourism—but recognition alone does not determine what tourism will sustain.
The important question is not simply how to bring more visitors to the village. It is whether a visitor economy can strengthen the ongoing work needed to keep land productive, ecologically functional and locally cared for.
Story of Green Youth Collective working in Cam Phu village in land restoration process.
Two connected areas, one working landscape
Recovering ecological function on the river-facing land
The community restoration area faces demanding conditions: exposed soil, intense dry-season heat, heavy rain, seasonal inundation and erosion along the river edge.
Work begins with observing how water moves, where vegetation is already establishing, how slope and exposure affect moisture and which areas are most vulnerable. Small water-harvesting pits and biomass basins are tested to slow runoff and hold moisture. Mulch and locally available organic matter protect exposed soil. A nursery supplies useful and locally suitable plants while allowing the team to observe how different species respond to heat, intense rainfall and temporary inundation.
Along the river edge, the aim is to establish a more diverse vegetated buffer. Trees, shrubs, grasses, bamboo and other useful plants perform different functions: covering and holding soil, producing shade and biomass, creating habitat and improving the conditions in which slower-growing vegetation can establish.
The work is intentionally specific in scale. It improves ecological function within land that local people can directly manage. Methods are monitored and adjusted rather than presented as a fixed solution for flood protection across Gò Nổi.
An on-site community nursery: planting material, capability and livelihood
Control over planting material is part of control over restoration.
The Tropical Nursery Manual describes nurseries as a key link among ecological restoration, sustainable agriculture, economic resilience, learning and cultural renewal. Its Target Plant Concept starts with the purpose and conditions of the outplanting site, then asks what species, source, size and plant characteristics will have the best chance of establishing there. This is especially relevant in Gò Nổi, where young plants may face intense dry-season heat, rapid moisture loss, heavy rainfall and temporary inundation within the same landscape.
The on-site nursery allows planting material to be developed in direct relationship with these conditions. Seed and other propagating material can be collected from useful, climate-resilient and locally appropriate plants; different species and propagation methods can be tested; and field observations can return to the nursery to improve the next planting cycle. Survival after heat, flood or erosion is therefore not only an outcome to record. It becomes practical knowledge that shapes what the community grows next, when it plants and how young plants are prepared and cared for.
This feedback loop reduces dependence on generic seedlings and decisions made far from the site. Local practitioners can build capability across the whole restoration process: selecting and propagating plants, matching them to different microsites, planting, aftercare, monitoring and adjusting methods over time. The nursery functions as a living plant library, a production base and a place where knowledge can remain active within the community rather than leaving when a short project ends.
It can also create a pathway towards climate-adaptive livelihoods. Nursery work, planting and long-term maintenance require skilled local labour. Useful plants can contribute food, fodder, medicine, shade, biomass, habitat, erosion control or future farm and household needs while performing ecological functions. At REwild, the nursery is being developed as community restoration infrastructure that can support local land care, learning and—where reliable demand and finance are built—paid roles or small-enterprise opportunities connected to restoration.
When a community can decide what to grow, produce it locally, observe how it performs and adapt the next generation of plants, it begins to own the restoration process—not simply participate in someone else’s planting project.
Bringing restoration into productive farming
At the nearby REwild working farm, the same principles enter everyday cultivation.
Compost and plant residues return to the soil. Crops and useful plants are diversified for food, shade, biomass, habitat and resilience. Seed saving and propagation help maintain locally usable planting material. Animals, plants, soil organisms, water, organic resources and human work are designed as connected parts of the farm rather than separate production units.
This is where restoration and livelihood begin to support one another. Farming creates the daily presence needed to observe land, respond to seasonal change and maintain ecological work. Land care can produce food, planting material, knowledge and meaningful work. Village-based hospitality is being developed gradually around these foundations, creating a potential source of finance for stewardship without turning the farm into scenery detached from its productive purpose.
The two areas therefore have different but complementary functions. One concentrates on ecological recovery. The other connects that recovery with food production, capability and a local stewardship economy. Nursery plants, biomass, observations and practical knowledge can move between them.
Together, they form one working landscape—shaped through seasons of observation, failure, adjustment and renewed care.
What this place makes visible
A floodplain agro-ecosystem is more than farmland beside a river. It is a connected system of water, sediment, soil, vegetation, biodiversity, crops, organic resources, local knowledge, livelihoods and village institutions. A change in one part affects the others.
The community nursery makes one of these dependencies visible: restoration requires suitable planting material, skilled care and a learning loop between nursery and field. Ecological recovery and community capability therefore have to grow together.
REwild makes these relationships available for practical inquiry. It is being developed as a Floodplain Agro-ecosystem Restoration Learning Hub: a place where farmers, young people, practitioners, students, researchers and institutions can examine real conditions, compare methods and follow what happens beyond the moment of planting. This reflects a wider understanding of restoration education as ecological, social, cultural and economic practice rather than a single technical activity (Global Landscapes Forum, 2022).
The place connects four GYC Working Models. Floodplain Agro-ecosystem Restoration rebuilds ecological processes and stewardship. Closed-loop Farming and Agroecology reconnects nutrients, biodiversity, farming and food. Community Schools for Regeneration uses the working landscape as a shared field of practice. Regenerative Tourism develops ways for hospitality and visitor economies to support rather than displace the conditions the place needs.
This work also belongs to the wider living heritage of Hội An. UNESCO’s Historic Urban Landscape approach understands heritage as extending beyond historic buildings to include hydrology, land use, social practices, cultural values and economic processes. From this perspective, sustaining floodplain farms, river relationships, local food, knowledge and livelihoods is part of sustaining the larger landscape that gives Hội An its meaning.
REwild is not a finished restoration showcase. It is a place where restoration remains visible as work: repeated, seasonal and inseparable from the people who continue to care for the land.