Support for Vietnam’s climate battle

With a DKK 200 million grant (EUR 26.86 million) Denmark has become the first country to support Vietnam in its fight against climate change.

By Anna Mogensen

Photo: Klaus Holsting, Danida

Without fanfare, Denmark has become Vietnam’s strongest ally in the fight against climate change. In late 2008 the Danish Ambassador to Vietnam, Peter Lysholt Hansen, and Vietnam’s Minister for Natural Resources and the Environment, Pham Khoi Nguyen, signed a comprehensive agreement that provides DKK 200 million in funding to help Vietnam prevent and adapt to climate change. The financial support covers the period 2009-2013, and makes Denmark the first donor to Vietnam’s national climate programme, which is designed to tackle the alarming shifts in climate.

Vietnam is among the five countries most severely affected by climate change, according to data from the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is forecast that sea levels along Vietnam’s coast will rise 33 centimetres by 2050, and as high as 1 metre by 2100. A sea level rise on this scale will make 20 million people homeless, and 80 per cent of the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam will disappear in 40 years.

These predictions of catastrophe have put climate high on Vietnam’s political agenda. To help limit the consequences of climate change, the Vietnamese government produced a road map for climate change adaptation in late 2008, The National Target Program.

Denmark’s support of climate adaptation in Vietnam is targeted partly at national level, and partly at specific activities in the coastal provinces of Ben Tre and Quang Nam, which are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

“Vietnam’s CO2 emissions are still limited, so the pressing challenge right now is adaptation to climate change. The first step is to identify the consequences of climate change in order to map out the initiatives needed in the action plan. Not least, research and pilot projects need to be launched because this is a whole new field where, if you want my honest opinion, nobody knows how to manage climate change in the most effective way,” says ambassador Peter Lysholt Hansen, who adds:

“On the one hand you need to act quickly. On the other hand you need to advance cautiously, because nobody wants to start a project which turns out to be irrelevant and a waste of time.”

Vietnam’s transition from planned economy to market economy, assisted by the strong work ethic of the Vietnamese people, has led to a surge in economic growth since the mid 1990s. And as the growth curve has climbed, so the number of poor has declined very significantly.

But Vietnam risks losing momentum in its war on poverty if consideration for the poorest is not woven into the plans for how the Vietnamese people can best adapt to climate change.

“The poor are the most vulnerable to climate change. It is their homes which are lost, their fields which are flooded. This double challenge – climate adaptation and fighting poverty – is in this respect not a top-down process, but has been placed in the provinces,” says Trang Thuy Nguyen, who coordinates climate-related activities at the Danish Embassy in Hanoi. She explains:

“For example, it is a key feature of the Danish programme to support women in the provinces, since it is often the women who are most vulnerable. So we recommend building up the efforts around the people’s own experience and place climate-related initiatives out with local people and decision makers in the provinces.”