Accelerating Clean, Green, and Climate-Resilient Growth in Vietnam : A Country Environmental Analysis
Vietnam has demonstrated great and almost unrivaled development success over the past few decades as evidenced by a variety of measures, including national income, poverty reduction, and access to services. However, Vietnam’s performance in terms o...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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Washington, DC : World Bank
2022
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099750207122238551/P1752330012c5e01b0a06203fb3ce9861e3 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37704 |
| Summary: | Vietnam has demonstrated great and
almost unrivaled development success over the past few
decades as evidenced by a variety of measures, including
national income, poverty reduction, and access to services.
However, Vietnam’s performance in terms of progress on
robust, equitable and sustainable development, an
overarching objective of the country’s current policy
framework, highlights that Vietnam is comparing less
favorably when benchmarked against countries at similar
income level, in the East Asia and Pacific region or
globally, especially on the environment and resource
efficiency. The shortcomings in critical areas of
development point to important areas for policy action and
investments in relation to the environment, especially as
Vietnam strives to ascend to upper-middle-income country
status (a level at which countries’ international and
regional peers generally perform significantly higher).
These include measures to rapidly decouple economic
activities from polluting fossil fuel consumption (and
advance renewable energy); make agriculture and industry
more resource-efficient, cleaner, and productive; boost
social resilience to natural disasters; and climate-proof
infrastructure. Considering today’s rampant pollution and
highly concerning degradation of the natural environment, it
is critical that Vietnam accelerates its shift to a growth
model that is cleaner, greener, and more climate resilient.
The current 2021–30 Socio-Economic Development Plan (SEDP)
and subordinate strategies (such as the new Green Growth
Strategy) are already motivated by the overarching policy
orientation toward sustainability. And the recent commitment
to achieve a carbon-neutral economy by midcentury gives
additional impetus to this critical transition. Moving
toward a more circular economy, in essence a more resource
efficient industry and harnessing the potential of renewable
resources to reduce leakage and pollution, in key sectors
and value chains can unlock significant growth potential and
help reverse the current trends. Many of the necessary
interventions, based on first-order estimates, can yield
significant benefits relative to costs. Conversely,
continuing the growth model of the past decades would result
in cumulative costs that create a drag on the economy.
Market-based instruments (including taxing carbon emissions
and polluting materials such as plastics), if designed well,
can unleash economic forces and leverage private sector
investments that can simultaneously boost Vietnam’s
sustainability, economic growth, and competitiveness. |
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