VietNamNet Bridge – According to the global environment outlook released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) last Friday, Vietnam contributes two of the six cities suffering from the most serious air pollution in the world.
If environmental losses are calculated, Vietnam’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be 3-4%.
According to Dr. Hoang Duong Tung, Director of the Environment Observatory and Information Centre under the Vietnam Environmental Protection Agency, Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, Vietnam has all of the problems pointed out in the report.
For the dust concentration in the air, Vietnam’s two big cities rank only behind Beijing, Shanghai of China, New Delhi of India and Dhaka of Bangladesh. Hanoi and HCM City are among the six cities suffering the most severe air pollution in the world.
Nguyen Ngoc Ly, Head of the Sustainable Development Cluster, UNDP Vietnam, said that the environmental pollution in HCM City was now at a serious level, the same as Bangkok, Thailand.
“According to research by Yale University in 2006, Vietnam is at the lowest level among eight Southeast Asian nations in research on sustainable environment indicators,” Dr. Duong said.
The World Bank’s 2007 report on climate change says that Vietnam is one of the two countries that will suffer the biggest influences from ice melting. If the temperature continues to increase, Vietnam may lose 17% of its agricultural land. Some experts forecast that by 2050, Vietnam’s Dung Quat area may be under seawater due to sea-level increases.
Many experts say that Vietnam’s current GDP growth is around 8%, but environmental losses caused by the development process taken into account, the real growth rate would be 3-4%.
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The report on global environment, Environment for Development, is compiled by over 390 experts and it is reviewed by over 1,000 other experts in the world.
The report draws a dark panorama of the global environment in all aspects: atmosphere, land, water, biodiversity, and others.
It forecasts that in this century, the world temperature will increase by 1.8 to 4oC while it rose by only 1.2oC in the previous 150 years.
The lives and lifestyles of people will be seriously affected by global environmental changes, especially the poor. Since 1992, over 1,000 have died in floods and over 1.2 billion from flood influences. Around 2 billion people are living in desert areas.
In the next century, 1.8 billion people will live in water-scarce areas and two-thirds of them will lack clean water. Furthermore, around 16,000 species face extinction.
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Phuong Loan | 
