The Mekong Delta province of Tien Giang has evacuated 236 households from flood-hit and landslide-prone areas in Cai Be and Tan Phuoc districts.

The evacuation, with a total funding of around 4 billion VND (188,000 USD), aims to resettle those residents in safer places when the province is among the localities in the Mekong delta region most vulnerable to climate change.

Apart from the effort, the province has invested over 85 billion VND (3.99 million USD) to treat 248 landslide-hit areas with a total length of 15,000 metres since 2005.

So far, the province has had 152 areas with high risk of landslide.

Climate change affects marine and coastal ecosystems through a gradual process, notably an increase in temperature, changes in salinity levels, acidity, turbidity and loss of habitat due to higher sea levels.

Vietnam is one of the five countries most vulnerable to climate change while the Mekong Delta region, Vietnam ’s rice granary, is among the three large deltas in the world worst hit by it.

Scientists forecast that if the sea level rises by one metre, about 70 percent of land in the Mekong Delta region will be intruded by saltwater and Vietnam will lose two million hectares of farmland and many coastal localities will be inundated.

Vietnam has exerted efforts to deal with the issue as climate change is also taken into consideration in the country’s socio-economic development plans and strategies.-VNA