The East Meets West Foundation recently introduced a model programme to help communities in the central areas of Viet Nam adapt to climate change. According to the foundation’s survey, climate change is affecting lives in all 25 communes in central Quang Nam Province, where vulnerable farmers in the coastal, mountainous and lowland areas rely heavily on agriculture and fishing industries.
Most of those interviewed said they often lacked timely information on upcoming disasters and did not have access to Government policies regarding natural disasters preparedness and CC adaptation.
The survey also found that local authorities had similar problems, and lacked proper facilities for their work.
Le Hue, the village chief of Binh An Tay Commune, said, "We have about 15 young, strong men for rescue missions, but they don’t have motorised boats or life jackets."
In these areas, 90 per cent of the houses are made of bamboo or wood, and are simply not strong enough to resist the regular onslaught of storms and floods. As a result, 66 per cent of interviewees’ houses have been regularly damaged by floods and typhoons, according to the survey.
Rural roads, irrigation systems, clean water systems, electrical power lines and bridges must be built of concrete in these 25 communities, said Ly Dinh Son, director of the Centre for Business Entities and Community Development (CBC).
The survey was conducted last year by the EMW, which included an extensive field study of 125 households in 25 communities in Quang Nam Province, a coastal area especially vulnerable to rising sea levels, flooding and typhoons.
Under the project, the foundation and the CBC conducted discussions with community representatives and local authorities on the impacts of climate change and on identifying cost-effective solutions to minimise its impact, especially on low-income communities.
The EMW also proposed the model programme for dealing with the effects of climate change, which provided a set of ideas for raising awareness and solutions to deal with the consequences of climate change.
"It is key to point out that the most vulnerable communities in central Viet Nam and throughout the country will experience climate change as an ongoing series of catastrophic weather-related events, and not as a gradual phenomenon. Therefore, no matter what plans are proposed or made, it is essential that they be integrated into existing disaster-planning processes," said David Hulse, the representative of the Ford Foundation in Viet Nam which sponsored the programme.
The EMW had planned to work with participating communities and local authorities to assess how to best help poor and vulnerable communities in rural Viet Nam develop effective and affordable strategies to minimise the adverse impacts of climate change.
"The key to successful climate change adaptation is going to be finding community development solutions that take climate change into account, and combining these solutions with good disaster planning and the creation of environmentally-friendly livelihoods," said EMW’s Executive Director John Anner.
Hulse said that climate change was so great a threat that it could only be addressed through a collective effort between countries, institutions and sectors, and added that climate change would have direct impacts on Viet Nam’s economy and on its development goals, such as poverty reduction.
The EMW was working to develop a clear set of practical steps that would prepare rural communities for the onset of climate change and reduce or alleviate the possible impacts to their lives and livelihoods.
Meanwhile, according to Rick McGowan, EMW’s Water, Sanitation, Environment and Climate Change Consultant, the problem was that people in the central region of the country were often too poor to prepare or protect themselves from such disasters.
Thus, the model programme would aim to give locals the tools to deal with these problems.
Protection laws ignored
While most medium- and small-sized enterprises in the central areas were exploiting natural resources, they were ignoring environmental protection laws, and as a result Quang Nam Province was at risk of resource exhaustion, said Son.
In the model programme, his centre had carried out a project under which farmers could have eco-friendly seafood processing, eco-friendly fish sauce and tree plantations that offered high economic value in the coastal areas.
Currently, his centre has succeeded in guiding farmers in the province to grow 15ha of rattan, as well as five parks full of seedlings for 10,000 trees, in response to this threat of resource exhaustion.