environmental problems in vietnam essay

Climate change in Vietnam: impacts and adaptation

Économiste, Agence française de développement (AFD)

Senior Researcher, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)

Researcher, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)

Research associate professor, Toulouse School of Economics – École d'Économie de Toulouse

Chargée de recherche sur les impacts du changement climatique, Agence française de développement (AFD)

Associate Professor of climate science, University of Science and Technology of Hanoi

Disclosure statement

Alexis Drogoul's current research projects receive funding from the European Union, the French National Research Agency and ANRS-MIE.

Emmanuel Pannier a reçu des financements de Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Agence Française de Développement, Ambassade de France au Vietnam, Agence National de la Recherche (France).

Manh-Hung Nguyen, Marie-Noëlle Woillez, Thanh Ngo-Duc, and Étienne Espagne do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation FR.

AFD (Agence française de développement) provides funding as a member of The Conversation FR.

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Vietnam is often presented as one of the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change. But what precisely would be the social and economic impacts in the country if the global average temperature increases by 1.5°C, 2°C or even more in the coming decades? Could local drivers of environmental changes worsen these impacts and what could be the policy and endogenous leverages for adaptation?

Recent temperature data for Vietnam show an accelerating warming trend in the recent decades, with an average value of ~0.2°C/decade over the last 40 years and the highest increase in the last decade. Over the same period, the annual rainfall slightly increased by 5.5% on average, but with contrasting trends depending on regions. In addition, sea level is rising, with an average trend of 3.6 mm/year over 1993–2018. A new climate dataset has been built specifically for this report to evaluate more clearly the recent climatic trends over the whole country .

Regarding future climate projections, at the end of the century, temperature is projected to increase from ~1.3°C under a scenario of low greenhouse gases global emissions (scenario RCP2.6) and to ~4.2°C under a high emissions scenario (scenario RCP8.5), with faster increases on the North of the country than in the South. Annual rainfall is projected to increase in most regions as well, but with a different seasonal distribution. This is the result of a bias-correction downscaling technique, that we used to improve the spatial resolution of projections from global climate models. The new downscaled data enable everyone to quantify the changes in climate variables such as temperature and precipitation over the country’s different regions .

Even if it is difficult to reconstruct more long term climate data before the early 20th century for Vietnam, on can rely on proxies for environmental change, or from historical archives, which have their own bias. But this embryonic environmental history already shows that Vietnamese society has long lived in the middle of climate events. What is particularly interesting in Vietnam climate history is the early emergence of political structures that echo the constant need to adapt to or control natural events. Even if the climate issue was not the same as it is today, there were already political responses to climatic hazards that can highlight today’s climate actions as well.

At the forefront of local and global pressures

The Mekong River delta is one of the largest deltas in the world, currently home to 17 million people and supplying more than half of Vietnam’s rice production. The region is facing several threats : some arise from ongoing climate change, and others from human activities in the delta or upstream. Global climate change will drive rising temperature and precipitation changes in the delta, just as in other regions of Vietnam, but the very low elevation of the delta makes it a hotspot for another threat: rising sea level. Indeed, the average altitude of the delta is only about 80 cm above present sea level. Projections of future sea-level rise for the end of the century range between +24 cm to +84 cm, depending on the climate scenario, which means that large parts of the delta could fall below sea-level by the end of the century, or even earlier, should worst-case scenarios of polar ice-sheet destabilization become reality.

However, in the short to mid-term, parts of the delta may fall below sea-level not because of climate change but because of human activities in the delta. The delta is actually losing elevation , at a rate much higher than global sea-level rise. Groundwater over-extraction is driving subsidence, which is the gradual lowering of the land surface because of sediment compaction. Subsidence rates can reach several centimeters per year in some places. The current rate of sea-level rise is about 3.6 mm/year while the rate of subsidence reaches up to 5 cm/year.

In addition, the delta also faces increasing saline water intrusions in surface waters during the dry season, with negative impacts on agriculture and aquaculture. The phenomenon is mainly driven by riverbed level erosion , caused by sediment starvation from upstream dams and sand mining. In the coming decades, riverbed erosion actually appears as the greatest factor which could drive large increases in saline water intrusions. In a worst-case scenario, areas affected by salt intrusion could increase by nearly 40% by midcentury, decreasing fresh water availability and the area suitable for rice cropping during dry season. In these extreme scenarios, we found that about 140,000 ha (10%) of current winter-spring rice cropping area would no longer be suitable for rice cultivation.

Thus, controlling groundwater extraction and sand mining appear as the most efficient mitigation measures to limit elevation loss and saline water intrusions in the coming decades. On the ground however, farmers can partly adjust their techniques, but they would also face the dire necessity to switch crop or even migrate when yields become too low… In the end, adaptation strategies always combine a mix of endogenous decisions and governmental decisions that interact and influence each other .

Socio-economic impacts at the national level

At the national level, it is possible to estimate the impact of climate variability on some key social aspects and economic sectors. For instance, using monthly data on mortality rate during the 2000-2018 period, we find robust evidence on the effect of extreme temperature, in particular cold and heat waves on mortality. Climate change would also affect the prevalence of many infectious diseases. But health is just the most extreme aspect of the potential impact of climate change on Vietnamese society and households.

Indeed, households could also be affected in their daily life at work. Using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, we find that one additional day that has temperature higher than 33 Celsius degree causes a decline in income, as well as escalated income inequality as low-income families suffered a loss of 1.51% more than other groups. Using the Labor Force Survey, we find that a 1°C rise in temperature leads to a 0.5% expansion in gender hourly wages gap. On the demand side of the labor market, using the Vietnam Enterprise Survey, our research shows that an increase in temperature would reduce firms’ revenue, total factor productivity, output, and size.

In the energy sector, as temperature increases, demand for electricity rises. It is estimated that a 1 degree Celcius increase would raise residential electricity consumption by about 5% and firm electricity consumption by 4%. In addition, energy using fossil fuels releases more pollutant emissions. On the supply side, our study focuses on the hydropower sector and water flow in main river basins in Vietnam. Most climate forecasts say that increased precipitation will enable hydropower production to rise in the future. However, more variability in rainfall during a year will need more investment in bigger water reservoirs to store water for hydropower generation.

These impacts on some key economic sectors of the Vietnamese economy build up an aggregate direct damage over Vietnam of ~4.5% for a 1.5°C increase in global average temperatures, and ~6.7% GDP loss for a 2°C increase in global average temperature. Of course, economic sectors are not autonomous from each other or from the rest of the world. They interact through intermediate consumptions, exports and imports, but also through the financial interlinkages with the rest of the world and more broadly the decisions of the financial sector. By plugging the direct damages into a macroeconomic model, i.e. mainly the impacts on rice, the energy sector, labor productivity, technical change, but also mortality and health, we estimated that on average, the macroeconomic damages are 30% higher than the direct damages. This result shows how crucial it is to not just stop at the sectoral level but also to understand how macroeconomic linkages might amplify the climate impacts.

Adaptation strategies as development strategies

At the level of the Mekong region, local adaptation decisions are insufficient. Cooperation over the use of water is central to the region adaptation and mitigation capacity. Transboundary governance becomes part of the urgent need to move toward a just transition and with the general principle that water is a basic need and right of every Mekong inhabitant. The recent Mekong River Commission initiative called “proactive regional planning” could play an integrative role, via joint mitigation investment projects and adaptation measures between countries, actors, and sectors.

For decades, Vietnam has been working to improve the country’s adaptation policy framework. As a result, significant progress has been made to strengthen community resilience and adaptive capacity, reduce natural disaster risks, and limit climate change impacts. However, vulnerability and risk issues have not been adequately reflected in climate change adaptation and disaster prevention strategies, particularly in infrastructure development, due to a lack of appropriate evaluation and decision-support tools. Meanwhile financing and international aid is lagging behind.

It should be clear however that major challenges will not be only addressed by increasing financing as some adaptation projects or even policies do not clearly contribute to reducing risks and vulnerabilities. Just as adaptation is the result of complex interactions between planned policies and individual choices, it is the complex interplay between official climate change finance and local social dynamics that shapes the structure of adaptation funding. In a region such as the Mekong Delta, people have been adapting to changing conditions for centuries and continue to do so even in the absence of policy incentives or constraints, as evidenced by the major land-use changes that have taken place over the past two decades.

It is therefore necessary to consider approaches and decision support models that take into account both spontaneous and planned adaptation , as both are sources of innovation or major changes in system dynamics. There is also an urgent need to develop and implement comprehensive planning, monitoring and evaluation systems for adaptation and more generally to mainstream adaptation into the whole development planning and budgeting processes of the country.

Adaptation to the inevitable impacts of climate change is thus a matter of development strategy for Vietnam, in parallel with its own ambitious contribution to the necessary emission reduction efforts announced at COP26.

This article was co-written by Frédéric Thomas (CNRS, laboratoire MIVEGEC), Thi Phuong Linh Huynh (IRD), Toan Thuy Le (CESBIO), Thi Thu Ha Nguyen (LASTA), Truong Toan Nguyen (University of Queensland), Tu Anh Nguyen (IMHEN), Frédéric Thomas (IRD), Chi Quang Truong (CTU), Quoc Thanh Vo (CTU), and Canh Toan Vu (ISET).

• Climate change
• Sea level rise
• The Conversation France
• Mekong Delta
• Waste disposal
• climate scenario

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Environment and Narrative in Vietnam

• © 2024
• Ursula K. Heise 0 ,
• Chi P. Pham 1

Department of English, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

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Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi, Vietnam

• Demonstrates the complex history of national stewardship and ecological management in Vietnam
• Seeks to build a knowledge on ecological crises and environmental cultures of South East Asia
• Contributes interdisciplinary research from anthropologists, art historians, and scholars of language and literature

Part of the book series: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment (LCE)

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About this book

Environment and Narrative in Vietnam  brings together essays about Vietnam’s natural environments and environmental crises from the perspective of culture, with particular attention to narrative templates that have shaped perceptions and interactions with nature on the part of different communities. The essays in this volume explore theoretical problems in the assessment of ecological stewardship and attitudes toward nature across cultures. They focus on both majority (Kinh) and ethnic minority narratives about nature and seek to outline how different ideas of modernization, from the French colonial project to the Marxist understanding of nature on the part of the Communist government, have shaped perceptions, policies, and activism regarding the environment. The essays also highlight the tensions and confluences between nationalist nation-building projects and economic integration into global markets for environmental thinking over the last half-century, and they analyze how texts from literary fiction to contemporary news media represent different environmental cultures in Vietnam. Taken together, the essays in Environment and Narrative in Vietnam begin to fill a significant gap in the understanding of environmental cultures in Asia and in the Environmental Humanities. This is an open access book.

• Literature and the Environment
• environmental crises
• Vietnam literature
• South Asian Literature
• environmental humanities
• environmental cultures
• nation-building

Table of contents (14 chapters)

Front matter, introduction: environment and narrative in vietnam.

• Ursula K. Heise, Chi P. Pham

Theoretical Foundations

Protected area narratives in vietnam: an anthropological and mesological approach.

• Christian Culas

Indigenous and Spiritual Narratives of the Environment

Legends of forest spirits in the central vietnamese highlands.

• Thi Kim Ngan Nguyen

Tai Narrative, Ritual, and Discourses of the Environment in North Central Vietnam

• Achariya Choowonglert

Animal Mercy Release, Environmental Conservation, and the Media in Vietnam

• Mai Hoàng Thạch

War Narratives and the Environment

Narratives of the natural world in vietnamese postwar movies (1986–2020).

• Cam-Giang Hoang

Ecopedagogy, War Memories, and Sensory Experiences of Nature in Contemporary Vietnamese Children’s Literature

• Montira Rato

Đỉnh Q. Lê’s The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits

• Conor Lauesen

Communism, Global Markets, and the Environment

Civil war, socialism’s underworld, and the environment, ecologies of coffee sustainability in the central highlands.

• Sarah G. Grant

Environmental Literature in Vietnam

Environmental travel narratives in the magazine nam phong.

• Nguyen Phuong Ngoc

Gender and Environment in Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s Narratives

• Kim Lan Cao

When the City Speaks Up: Nature, City, and Identity in Lê Minh Hà’s Phố vẫn gió

• Trần Tịnh Vy

Political Dimensions in Vietnamese Ecofiction

Chi P. Pham

Editors and Affiliations

Ursula K. Heise

About the editors

Ursula K. Heise  is holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies. She is co-founder and Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, and Spain; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. She is co-editor of Literatures, Cultures and the Environment series for Palgrave Macmillan.

Chi P. Pham  is a Tenured Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi. She received her first Ph.D. degree in Literary Theory in Vietnam and her second Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside (USA). She is the secretary of the Association   for the Study of Literature and Ecology in ASEAN (ASLE-ASEAN).

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Environment and Narrative in Vietnam

Editors : Ursula K. Heise, Chi P. Pham

Series Title : Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-41183-0 Published: 30 January 2024

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-41186-1 Due: 12 February 2025

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-41184-7 Published: 29 January 2024

Series ISSN : 2946-3157

Series E-ISSN : 2946-3165

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVI, 351

Number of Illustrations : 15 b/w illustrations

Topics : Literary Theory , Asian Literature , History, general , Environmental Communication

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