Projected climate change imapacts on the Mekong Delta

This trip to Vietnam has represented one of the most comprehensive and encompassing learning experiences I've ever had. Studying while immersed in a totally foreign culture means that you are always learning. Unless you're asleep, the new experiences and perspective-altering observations never stop. (And even then, new things happened to me as my Malaria medication gave me some really crazy dreams.) It was exhausting on one hand, physically and mentally, but it was also so enriching. This will be one of the high points in my college years, and one of the best classes I have taken at any point during my education.

Our group was given regular assignments to synthesize our learning, and one part of this was completing research-heavy "question sets." To give an example of some of our course work, I will share a few paragraphs from one of my questions sets. This will also give an overview of some projected climate change impacts on the Mekong River Delta in South Vietnam:

Question Set #2: Climate change impacts on Vietnam’s coastal and low-lying areas. Detail current sensitivity and vulnerability, future trends in terms of impacts and vulnerabilities, and adaptation and mitigation options.

Vietnam’s economy is growing quickly and as a result the country is gaining international relevance and influence. Many recent years have resulted with an overall growth rate near 8%, and 11.5% in the Mekong River Delta region (Ninh 2012). That growth, however, has been a relatively recent phenomenon due to the growth of their industrial sector (including a more industrialized agricultural sector). Therefore, the country’s historical contribution to climate change via greenhouse gas emissions has been almost insignificant compared with Western societies like America and Western Europe. Regardless of their historic contribution, Vietnam is likely to suffer the most from the effects because of their position as a low-lying coastal nation. A sea-level rise of 100 cm would cause a predicted land loss of 40.000 km or 21.1 % of the Mekong River Delta’s land mass. This level of loss would expose and/or displace 17.1 million people, which is 23.1% of the population (Ninh 2012). In the words of Michael Waibel: “Although Vietnam has only played a small part in creating the problems of global environmental change and faces many other challenges, it cannot avoid the impacts of climate change. Implementing adaptation policies seems mandatory” (2008).

The Nobel Prize-winning 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report identifies Southeast Asia as among the most vulnerable regions on Earth (Cruz et al., 2007). This is due in part to the geography of Vietnam as a low-lying coastal nation. Statistically, the country ranks fourth behind China, India, and Bangladesh in terms of the absolute number of people living in vulnerable, low elevation coastal zones (LECZ), defined as the contiguous area along the coast that is less than 10 m above sea level. About 43 million Vietnamese, or about 55% of the country’s population, are living in those LECZ. This is the highest percentage of all countries worldwide (Waibel, 2008). However, their vulnerability is also due to their status as a developing nation. Adaptation for the coasts of developing countries will be more challenging than for coasts of developed countries, due to constraints on adaptive capacity. According to the 2007 IPCC Report on coastal systems and low-lying areas: “Developing nations may have the political or societal will to protect or relocate people who live in low-lying coastal zones, but without the necessary financial and other resources/capacities, their vulnerability is much greater than that of a developed nation in an identical coastal setting” (Nicholls and Wong, 2012).

The Mekong River Delta (MRD) is one of the largest and most fertile river deltas in the world. As a result, the agricultural sector has held steady at approximately 20% of Vietnam’s GDP over the last decade, and Vietnam is the world’s second leading exporter of rice. The MRD is Vietnam’s most significant agricultural area, leading in rice production, aquaculture, and fruit products. Rice is the most important crop nationally and is grown on about four-fifths of the cropped land in Vietnam (Ninh 2012), and the MRD specifically accounts for over 80% of the nation’s rice exports (Sanh 2008). All of this agricultural productivity is under threat, however, as global climate change threatens to inundate much of the MRD with rising seawater. “As such, climate change, especially sea-level rise, directly impacts the lives of millions of Vietnamese and the food security of the world” (Phat, 2010).