Hanoi looks forward to becoming climate resilient city

Hanoi (VNA) - Hanoi has been selected to implement a pilot project to alleviate, control and cope with natural disasters.

The announcement was made at a workshop held jointly by the World Bank (WB) and
the Hanoi People's Committee in Hanoi on Feb. 24 to introduce a primer on
reducing vulnerabilities to disasters.

Federica Ranghieri, environmental expert of the WB and also lead author of the
book, said the primer aims to provide local policymakers with information about
climate change, its impacts and how to cope with it. Such information will be
the basic for them to know how to start working on climate change, she said.

Ranghieri said "We selected Vietnam because it is of course vulnerable and it
has a lot of capacity.Many capacities are already there among the city officials."
She added that Hanoi is the capital so it is definitely the best example the
project can use to scale up in many more cities.

According to Ranghieri, most of Vietnamese cities are climate prone and have a lot
of challenges more than many other countries all over the world. She said that as
many of the country's coastal cities are laying in very low zone, sea level rise
is one of the big challenges.

"But many cities like Hanoi which are not coastal now experiencing many problems
connected to floods, rainfall that are changing to temperature which are rising or
decreasing," the expert said, forecasting many impacts in the flowing years.

According to Vice Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Dao Xuan Hoc, in
2007, natural calamities and floods in Vietnam caused 435 deaths or missing,
pulled down 7,800 houses, damaged 1,300 dams and sluice-gates and 1,500 km of
dyke, leading to a total loss of 11.6 trillion VND, equal to 11 percent of the
GDP.

The intrusion by sea water, floods and traffic jams related to floods have
increased to an alarming level due to fast population and urbanisation growth as
well as inadequate transport infrastructure development plans.

Prof. Tran Thuc from the Hydrometeorology and Environment Institute said over the
past 50 years, the annual average temperature in Vietnam increased by 0.7
degree Celsius while rainfall has been decreasing in the dry season and increasing
in the rainy months, causing more frequent floods and droughts. He warned that if
the sea water level rises by 1 m, 10 percent of the Vietnamese population will be
directly affected and the country's GDP will reduce by 10 percent.

Thuc also said that even though the emission by Vietnam remains low,
representing only 0.4 percent of the world level, the country will suffer
green-house effect as a result of abundant use of fossil energies to meet
socio-economic demands. The book, therefore, is extremely important for managers,
the professor said.

The primer is the result of a joint research programme between the WB department
of East Asia and Pacific Sustainable Development and the UN International
Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN/ISDR).

After piloted in Hanoi , the model of climate resilient city will be multiplied
in other cities throughout the country.-Enditem