Da Nang receives int’l climate change assistance

Update: 24/02/2009
The central port city of Da Nang has signed an agreement with the multi-national Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET) and the UK-based Challenge to Change (CtC), regarding a project to increase its ability to cope with and respond to natural disasters.
The project aims to evaluate and formulate concrete schemes to improve Danang City’s capacity to cope with the effects of climate change and to systematically record both failures and successful experiences in tackling climate change.

This project is part of a USD 50 million programme, funded by the Rockefeller Fund of the United States, to help several cities in Vietnam, India, Thailand and Indonesia to cope with natural calamities that arise as a result of climate change.

Along with Da Nang, Quy Nhon City in the southern province of Binh Dinh and Can Tho City in the Mekong delta, are beneficiaries of the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), which will be executed over the next five years to help them prepare for the increased threat of natural calamities over the next few decades.

Vietnam is among the five countries in the world that will be hardest-hit by climate change.

Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Nguyen Van Duc warned a recent workshop that, by 2100, sea levels are forecast to rise by a metre and temperature is predicted to increase by up to 3 degrees Celsius.

Head of the Institute for Hydro-Meteorology, Tran Thuc Vien said that, should this prediction come to pass, approximately 10 percent of Vietnam’s population would bear the brunt of an increase in natural calamities, resulting in a 10 percent loss in the nation’s GDP and the annual flooding of some 40,000 sq. km of coastal plain each year.

During the past 50 years, Vietnam has experienced an increase in temperature of 0.7 degrees Celsius and a 20 cm rise in sea level.
Source: VietNamNet/VNA