Vietnam ‘s response to climate change will focus on adaptation, which will be mainly funded by State budget.
Other approach to climate change, mitigation, will be open for
engagement by the private sector as it concerns technology changes, and
low-carbon energy technologies in particular.
These remarks
were made by Truong Duc Tri, Deputy Director of Meteorology, Hydrology
and Climate Change at the press briefing on the national action plan for
climate change in 2010-20 held in Hanoi on April 17.
Prime
Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved 61 climate change projects that
aim to deal with urgent matters, with 15 projects of which receiving
funding from the State to start their working plans, Tri announced.
Vietnam has also received considerable amounts of international
support. From 2010 to 2012, aid for climate change stood at 500 million
USD and Vietnam was expected to receive an additional amount of 830
million USD.
Tri said that since the first script about climate
change and sea level rise for Vietnam by the end of this century
was introduced in 2009, there has been an increased awareness about the
seriousness of the issue across different stakeholders in the country,
particularly local authorities.
Forty-five provinces out of the total 63 have finished compiling their action plans to cope with climate change.
While it was clear to climate change experts that Vietnam would opt
for adaptation, some experts have expressed their concern that the
country may overuse hard-engineering solutions, particularly in
constructing dykes, and suggested Vietnam focus on “no-regret”
strategies.
Responding to this, Director of Vietnam’s
Institute of Meteorology , Hydrology and Environment Tran Thuc said
that while the hard-engineering approach was obviously important in
coping with climatic changes and had in fact been adopted on a large
scale, it was not true that Vietnam had abused that approach.
Thuc said in addition to this, other options were deployed, such as
soft techniques which relied on natural systems, and the country is
planning to expand the mangrove area along the coastal lines in the
south.
At the press briefing, Deputy Director of the Vietnam
Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment Nguyen Van Thang
said in the latest climate change script in 2012, climate change maps
were presented in low, medium and high emission scenarios.
A
new component to the updated version included inundation maps, initially
developed for the Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City , for the Red
River Delta in the north as well as for coastal provinces in the central
region.
The results showed that with a one-metre sea level
rise, the risk of inundation was high for more than 10 percent of the
Red River Delta and Quang Ninh province, 2.5 percent of coastal
provinces in the central region, more than 20 percent of the HCM City
area and 39 percent of the Mekong Delta.
More than 4 percent of
the railway system, 9 percent of national roads and 12 percent of
provincial roads of Vietnam were also likely to be affected.
Thuc said the script will be updated again in 2015, one year after the
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the global
and regional climate change scenarios in its 5th assessment.
Vietnam has been using IPCC reports as a benchmark for its analysis.-VNA