On December the 4th early in the morning, Tran Thai Binh successfully defended his thesis with the title "The knowledge-based search for water-related information system for the Mekong Delta, Vietnam". Binh developed an ontology in order to provide holistic results to user queries. E.g. if a user wants to monitor floods in a special region within a defined period od time, then Binh's system returns relevant datasets showing water level information, inundation maps as well as relevant literature and statistical data on the topic.

On September 19th, 2013 the WISDOM Closure Meeting was organized by DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen. About 30 WISDOM scientists including several PhD candidates from the WISDOM PhD Programme participated in this last project meeting. After a comprehensive summary of the second project phase given by the project leader Claudia Künzer all Work Package leaders held presentations on accomplished work of the second WISDOM phase. Furthermore, they reported the status of the PhD work and their expected finalization.

On Monday June 10th José Miguel Delgado successfully defended his Dissertation entitled "Explaining change in flood hazard in the Mekong river - the hypothesis of nonstationary variance" at the Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Potsdam. In his work José analysed the flood regime of the Mekong river and detected significant changes in variance of the annual floods.

Vo Quoc Tuan, who has been working at the German Aerospace Center, DLR, for the past 3.5 years successfully defended his PhD thesis at University of Kiel on May 24th 2013. His thesis has been associated to the WISDOM project, while funding came from a Worldbank Grant via Can Tho University, CTU. Topic of the thesis has been the valuation of ecosystem services of mangrove forests in the coastal Mekong Delta province of Ca Mau. Vo Quoc Tuan has published two SCI papers in renowned journals, and a third paper is currently under review.

Nước là nguồn chiến lược: Đồng bằng sông Cửu Long (in English: Water as a Strategic Resource: The Mekong Delta in Vietnam) is the titel of a new book published im May 2013 by the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences (VASS). The book is a co-production of the Southern Institute of Social Sciences (SISS) in Ho Chi Minh City and the Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Germany (editors: Prof. Bui The Cuong und Prof. Solvay Gerke), who are both partners in the WISDOM project.

Dr. Joern Birkmann (UNU-EHS) presented some selected findings of the WISDOM project in a high level expert workshop on “Climate Change and Climate Extremes in Vietnam”. The expert workshop in Hanoi on 17th of August 2012 dealt with the launch of the IPCC SREX report, which was presented by Prof. Pachauri /Chairman of the IPCC and lead authors of the report, such as Dr. Bach Tanh Sinh / Director of the Dep. of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology and Dr. Joern Birkmann / United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security.

Nadine Reis was awarded the KfW Prize for practice-relevant development research for her doctoral thesis on "Tracing and Making the State. Policy Practice and Domestic Water Supply in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam". Nadine Reis was a PhD candidate of the first phase of the WISDOM project and wrote her thesis at the Center for Development Research (ZEF).