SHEroic Journeys: Vietnamese Women's Eco-Trekking Tales for Climate Action

SHEroic Journeys explores how ethnic minority women in Northern Vietnam are using eco-trekking, homestays, craft, food, walking , storytelling and cultural knowledge as forms of climate action.

Working with with women living in and around the Hoang Lien National Park, the project examines how climate change, tourism, conservation pressures and shifting livelihoods are reshaping everyday relationships with land, heritage, family and community. Eco-trekking is understood not simply as walking through landscape, but as a wider cultural and environmental practice involving homestays, food, textile-making, farming, guiding, storytelling and intergenerational knowledge sharing.

Through creative participatory action research, the project listened to women's lived experiences of environmental change and explored how their everyday practices of guiding, hosting, farming, cooking, making, walking and caring can be understood as forms of climate knowledge, adaptation and resilience.

Methodology

SHEroic Jounreys used Creative Participatory Action Research to explore how women's eco-trekking practices can support climate action, sustainable tourism, cultural heritage and community resilience.

The project was grounded in deep, relational fieldwork with ethnic minority women and communities in Northern Vietnam. Working in the three villages of:

Ban Ho

Ta Van 

Hoang Lien

Across four field visits to the villages, the research team spent time with the women in their homes, villages and provinces, working in the places where their stories, livelihoods, memories and environmental knowledge are rooted.

The participatory sessions explored key themese