However, experts warn there is a possibility that sea levels will rise in the delta region around Can Tho due to climate change, causing devastating floods that will displace millions and destroy those crops.

Can Tho is in the wider Mekong Delta, a rice-growing region that spans southern Vietnam and is home to 18 million people. More than half of Vietnam’s rice is produced in the delta, as well as 60 percent of its fish and shrimp.

A 1m sea-level rise could displace more than seven million residents of the Mekong delta, and a 2m sea-level rise could double that number, according to a study by the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network in New York, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and other groups.

The delta is where the Mekong River divides into nine channels after a 5,000km journey from the Tibetan plateau. It is “particularly susceptible” to sea-level rises, says Alex de Sherbinin, a senior research associate at the Columbia University Center. A 1m sea-level rise is “definitely within the bounds” of happening this century, he told IRIN. A 2m sea-level rise, however, is less likely.

The study examined the major deltas of the world, and was based on current patterns of climate change and migration for glacier melt, as well as interviews with displaced residents.

According to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), considered the most authoritative group on the topic, millions of people in deltas in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Egypt will be directly affected by sea-level rises by the end of this century.

Bracing for changes

Although Vietnam has always been vulnerable to adverse weather, climate change “is making the hazards worse”, says Koos Neefjes, a climate change policy adviser to the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Vietnam.

Recent climate change in Vietnam is beyond the level of natural change, argues a 2009 report by by the UN Environment Programme. In the past 50 years, temperatures have increased by 0.05-0.20 degrees Celsius, and sea level has increased by 2-4 cm per decade, the report warns.

In the past 15 years, the country has experienced severe floods, although they are caused by a combination of factors, including deforestation and typhoons.

In 2000 and 2001, the worst torrents in recent history killed more than 500 people, many of them children. Significant tracts of farmland were inundated for months, destroying their crop-growing capabilities.

“There is time to handle that additional threat from climate change,” Neefjes told IRIN. “In a sense it is more urgent to address the development gap, the threats that have existed for years and that make this country in many parts not safe enough.”

Living with floods

The government has a policy called “living with floods” that tries to maximize good effects and minimize the bad effects of floods – rather than ending them through measures deemed too costly.

“A flood adaptation policy is better than eliminating them,” said Vo Thanh Danh, a researcher at the Institute of Climate Change Study at Cantho University. “Even floods bring more benefits than losses if we can live with and adapt to floods.”

Since 1998, authorities have been trying to relocate 200,000 households – about one million people – to less flood-prone areas.

The programme also tries to promote behavioural changes, such as encouraging villagers to switch to aquaculture from agriculture. Authorities have been teaching children to swim and equipping them with buoys. They are also constructing food compartments in ceilings that stay dry during floods, along with fresh water storage facilities.

Mekong delta residents are using rice varieties that can withstand fluctuations in water level and salinity. Still, much more work is needed, Neefjes said. “City planning must expand into better places, [such as higher ground].”

Without dyke reinforcements and improved drainage, a 1m rise in sea levels along the coast of Vietnam would inundate 5.3 percent of Vietnam’s total land area, reveals a 2010 government report.

Of that total, the sea-level rise could swamp more than 80 percent of the Mekong Delta, 9 percent in the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam, and 4 percent each in the north-central coast and southeast regions – an area that includes Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s largest metropolis of 7.1 million people.

Source: IRIN

Photo: David Gough/IRIN

Photo credit: Kevin German/Luceo Images

(New York Times) September 23, 2009 – CAI RANG, Vietnam – For centuries, as monsoon rains, typhoons and wars have swept over them and disappeared into the sunshine, the farmers and fishermen of the Mekong Delta have drawn life from the water and fertile fields where the great river ends its 2,700-mile journey to the sea.

The rhythms of life continue from season to season though, like much of the country, the delta is moving quickly into the future, and industry has begun to pollute the air and water.

But everything here, both the timeless and the new, is at risk now from a threat that could bring deeper and longer-lasting disruptions than the generations of warfare that ended more than 30 years ago.

In a worse-case projection, a Vietnamese government report released last month says that more than one-third of the delta, where 17 million people live and nearly half the country’s rice is grown, could be submerged if sea levels rise by three feet in the decades to come.

In a more modest projection, it calculates that one-fifth of the delta would be flooded, said Tran Thuc, who leads Vietnam’s National Institute for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Sciences and is the chief author of the report.

Storm surges could periodically raise that level, he said, and experts say an intrusion of salt water and industrial pollution could contaminate much of the remaining delta area.

The risks of climate change for Vietnam go far beyond the Mekong Delta, up into the Central Highlands, where rising temperatures could put the coffee crop at risk, and to the Red River Delta in the north, where large areas could be inundated near the capital, Hanoi.

Climate experts consider this nation of an estimated 87 million people to be among the half-dozen most threatened by the weather disruptions and rising sea levels linked to climate change that are predicted in the course of this century.

If the sea level rises by three feet, 11 percent of Vietnam’s population could be displaced, according to a 2007 World Bank working paper.

If it rises by 15 feet, 35 percent of the population and 16 percent of the country’s land area could be affected, the document said.

The government report emphasizes that the predictions represent the threat, based on current models, if no measures are taken in the coming decades, like building dikes.

But the potential disruptions and the tremendous cost of trying to reduce their impact could slow Vietnam’s drive to emerge from its postwar poverty and impede its ambitions to become one of the region’s economic leaders.

Once again, this nation, which has spent much of its history struggling to free itself from foreign domination, finds itself threatened by an overpowering outside force.

“Climate change isn’t caused by a developing country like Vietnam, but it is suffering the consequences,” said Koos Neefjes, a policy adviser on climate change with the United Nations Development Program in Hanoi.

In addition to rising seas in the Mekong Delta, climatologists predict more frequent, severe and southerly typhoons, heavier floods and stronger storm surges that could ultimately drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

Climate refugees could swell the population of Ho Chi Minh City, on low-lying land just north of the delta, as war refugees did when it was known as Saigon.

But the city itself is also at risk, says the government study, prepared by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. Up to one-fourth of the city’s area would be threatened by rising floodwaters if the sea level rose by three feet.

“Ho Chi Minh City could have a double impact if sea levels rise and living conditions in the delta are not sustainable,” Mr. Thuc, the lead author of the government report, said in an interview.

His report assesses only the climatological risks, he said, and a great deal more work needs to be done to try to determine their social and economic impacts and the probable effect on population displacement.

Because of the uncertainties of climate change and the variables of mitigation measures, it is impossible to rank nations precisely on a scale of risk, Mr. Neefjes said.

However, the 2007 World Bank working paper studied 84 coastal developing countries and found Vietnam to be the most threatened in terms of percentage of population affected, and second only to the Bahamas in terms of percentage of land area affected, if no mitigating measures are taken.

“Among all of the indicators used in this paper, Vietnam ranks among the top five most impacted countries,” the paper says. It did not include some small island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu that are also threatened with severe inundation.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change listed the Mekong Delta, Bangladesh and the Nile Delta in Egypt as the world’s three “hot spots” for potential migration because of their combination of sea-level rise and existing population.

As a region, Southeast Asia is disproportionately vulnerable, with only 3.3 percent of the world’s land mass but more than 11 percent of its coastline, the Asian Development Bank said in a report it released this year.

But Vietnam has at least recognized the problem and begun to address it, Mr. Neefjes said. “Faster than any developing country, it has actually developed a sensible national program to start responding,” he said.

Those plans include an attempt to integrate environmental concerns into the development plans of ministries and enterprises, modifications that could conflict with their ambitions for growth, he said.

Experts said Vietnam’s primary approach — the hugely expensive construction and reinforcement of thousands of miles of dikes — would bring its own set of problems.

In the delta, they said, the barriers will probably inhibit the self-cleansing mechanism of rivers and trap millions of cubic yards of industrial waste, hundreds of thousands of tons of industrial rubbish, and millions of tons of pesticides and fertilizer that are used in fish farms and shrimp farms.

“If one-third of the delta’s area is flooded by seawater, losses would be huge,” Vo Hung Dung, director of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Can Tho city branch, said last month in the newspaper Tuoi Tre. “But if the entire delta is polluted by wastewater, the losses could be many times higher.”

Here on the tiny Hau River, which winds through shaded groves of palm, bamboo and mangrove just south of Can Tho in the heart of the delta, there seems to be little awareness of these concerns.

Nguyen Thanh Chanh, 29, who fishes with his wife in a small boat, said that he sometimes listened to the radio and sometimes drank with friends at the end of the day, but that he had never heard any talk of climate change.

Life is already hard, and the rivers already flood during the monsoon season from June to November, from the swollen currents of the Mekong, from heavy rains and from tidal flooding.

An estimated 85 percent of the people in the delta are supported by agriculture.

“Those who farm go to the fields, and those who fish go to the rivers,” said Huynh Thuy, 47, a farmer. “They don’t worry much about the future.”

Source: New York Times