Vietnam Wetlands: Seriously Affected by Climate Change

Since 1989, Vietnam is the fiftieth nation in the world to join Ramsar Convention. This is the international earliest preservative convention in the world. For years, Vietnam has made great efforts to research, make statistic and build up varied tools and techniques to preserve, use and control wetlands under the shadow of Ramsar convention.

 

According to Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the total area of wetlands in Vietnam comes up to over 10 million hectares, in which wetlands for rice cultivation accounts for 4.1 million hectares. For years, the area of natural wetlands shrinkages while that of artificial wetlands increases. Specifically, coastal natural mangroves have been gradually eroded and replaced by fishery lagoons, tourism sites and planted forests. Mangrove cultivation has decreased by 183.724 hectares in 20 years. Meanwhile, fishery raising area increased 1.1 million hectares in 2003.

 

Coastal mangrove area was 494,000 hectares in 1982, increased to 606,792 hectares in 2000 due to increase in shrimp farming ground. Rice cultivation area in the Mekong Delta was 2,062,000 hectares in 1976, increased to 3,815,000 hectares in 2004. However, according to statistics from Southern Institute of Water Resource Research, salinization area in the Mekong Delta has increased to 50 percent of total region area (about 2 million hectares).

 

In recent years, thanks to the country’s industrialisation, urbanization and modernization speed, a large square of wetlands has been changed its use; therefore wetlands’ value and nature have fell into oblivion. At the same time, this development has caused Vietnam environment in general and wetlands in particular to trend worse owing to industrial waste, oil pollution, pesticide chemical, organic substances and poisons in resource exploitation.

 

Vietnam wetlands not only have great value in terms of economy, environment, biological diversity, culture, history but also play a role in limiting tsunami, flooding catastrophes. According to international practice, wetlands have become a hard question since 1971 when vital importance of wetlands was recognized that the convention was issued to protect them.

 

Despite great values, at the moment, Vietnam hasn’t taken full advantages of wetlands. Some have been exploited beyond their potential, for example, coastal fishing activities make it impossible for wetlands to recover. There are fishery growing areas exceeding ecological capacity (such as some bays in Quang Ninh provinces). While other sustainable values haven’t been promoted such as tourism, ecosystem, landscape, education and training, research etc, human activities have had huge impacts on wetlands like: reduce to square, change the climate, decrease ability to prevent catastrophe, for instance occluded lakes will eliminate environmental functions of storing water in rainy season and keeping water for summer, water loss will cause negative climate changes and sweep away landscape and ecosystem. Despite being considered a city of lakes, at present, Hanoi has its lake square narrowed dramatically. Thus, cultural, preservative values and tourist attraction will fall down. Bays such as Quang Ninh, Nha Trang etc are overexploited without measures for preservation and sustainable use.