Other approaches to climate change and mitigation are open for private sector involvement as they concern technological changes, particularly low-carbon energy .
Truong Duc Tri, Deputy Director of Meteorology, Hydrology and Climate Change, made these remarks in Hanoi on April 17 at a press briefing on the national action plan for mitigating climate change in 2010-20.
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved 61 climate change projects dealing with urgent matters, 15 of which are receiving funding from the State to begin their work, Tri said.
Vietnam has also received a considerable amount of international support. It received US$500 million in aid for climate change projects from 2010 to 2012 and expects an additional US$830 million in the future.
Tri said that since the first scenario of climate change and sea level rise in Vietnam by the end of this century was introduced in 2009, there has been increased awareness of the seriousness of the issue among different stakeholders in the country, particularly local authorities.
Forty-five of the nation’s 63 provinces 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 expressed their concern that the country may overuse hard-engineering solutions, particularly constructing dykes, and suggested that it should focus on "no-regret" strategies.
Responding to this suggestion, Director of the Vietnamese Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment, Tran Thuc, said that while the hard-engineering approach was obviously important for coping with climatic changes and had, in fact, been adopted on a large scale, it was not true that Vietnam had abused the solution.
Thuc said in addition to that approach, other options were also deployed, such as “soft” techniques that relied on natural systems, and the country is planning to expand the mangrove area along its southern coastlines.
At the press briefing, Deputy Director of the Vietnam Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment Nguyen Van Thang said maps of the latest low, medium and high emission climate change scenarios from 2012 have been devised.
A new component to the updated versions includes inundation maps for the Red River Delta in the north and coastal provinces in the central region, in addition to those initially developed for the Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City.
The results show that with a one-metre rise in sea level, there is a high risk of inundation for more than 10 percent of the Red River Delta and Quang Ninh province and 2.5% of central coastal provinces, as well as more than 20% of the Ho Chi Minh City area and 39% of the Mekong Delta.
More than 4% of the railway system, 9% of national roads and 12% of provincial roads in Vietnam are also likely to be affected.
Thuc said the scenario will be updated again in 2015, one year after the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its fifth assessment of global and regional climate change scenarios, which Vietnam has been using as a benchmark for its analysis.
