Vietnam 's response to climate change will focus on adaptation, which will be mainly funded by State budget.
Other approach to climate change, mitigation, will be open forengagement by the private sector as it concerns technology changes, andlow-carbon energy technologies in particular.
These remarkswere made by Truong Duc Tri, Deputy Director of Meteorology, Hydrologyand Climate Change at the press briefing on the national action plan forclimate change in 2010-20 held in Hanoi on April 17.
PrimeMinister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved 61 climate change projects thataim to deal with urgent matters, with 15 projects of which receivingfunding from the State to start their working plans, Tri announced.
Vietnam has also received considerable amounts of internationalsupport. From 2010 to 2012, aid for climate change stood at 500 millionUSD and Vietnam was expected to receive an additional amount of 830million USD.
Tri said that since the first script about climatechange and sea level rise for Vietnam by the end of this centurywas introduced in 2009, there has been an increased awareness about theseriousness of the issue across different stakeholders in the country,particularly local authorities.
Forty-five provinces out of the total 63 have finished compiling their action plans to cope with climate change.
While it was clear to climate change experts that Vietnam would optfor adaptation, some experts have expressed their concern that thecountry may overuse hard-engineering solutions, particularly inconstructing dykes, and suggested Vietnam focus on "no-regret"strategies.
Responding to this, Director of Vietnam'sInstitute of Meteorology , Hydrology and Environment Tran Thuc saidthat while the hard-engineering approach was obviously important incoping with climatic changes and had in fact been adopted on a largescale, it was not true that Vietnam had abused that approach.
Thuc said in addition to this, other options were deployed, such assoft techniques which relied on natural systems, and the country isplanning to expand the mangrove area along the coastal lines in thesouth.
At the press briefing, Deputy Director of the VietnamInstitute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment Nguyen Van Thangsaid in the latest climate change script in 2012, climate change mapswere presented in low, medium and high emission scenarios.
Anew component to the updated version included inundation maps, initiallydeveloped for the Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City , for the RedRiver Delta in the north as well as for coastal provinces in the centralregion.
The results showed that with a one-metre sea levelrise, the risk of inundation was high for more than 10 percent of theRed River Delta and Quang Ninh province, 2.5 percent of coastalprovinces in the central region, more than 20 percent of the HCM Cityarea and 39 percent of the Mekong Delta.
More than 4 percent ofthe railway system, 9 percent of national roads and 12 percent ofprovincial roads of Vietnam were also likely to be affected.
Thuc said the script will be updated again in 2015, one year after theInter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the globaland regional climate change scenarios in its 5th assessment.
Vietnam has been using IPCC reports as a benchmark for its analysis.-VNA
