Viet Nam hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8 per cent a year by 2030. This is equal to about 787.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Deputy Minister of Nature Resources and Environment Tran Hong Ha announced this yesterday at a conference in Ha Noi. He added that the figure could increase to 25 per cent if there was more international support.
The conference was called to announce the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) that Viet Nam submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat in September.
It was organised by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment )MONRE) in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme and German Development Corporation.
Ha said that as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change, Viet Nam had been implementing many policies in response.
To reduce emissions, the Conference of the Parties (COP19) in Poland in 2013 called on all UNFCCC parties to develop INDC. The Vietnamese Government tasked MONRE to collaborate with other relevant ministries and agencies to develop Viet Nam’s INDC report.
Ministries, non-governmental organisations, research agencies, and representatives of businesses, in addition to international development partners, made specific contributions to its development.
The INDCs of Viet Nam and other nations are important inputs for negotiations on a new climate deal in Paris at the end of the year.
Nguyen Khac Hieu, deputy director of the Department of Meteorology, Hydrology and Climate Change, said that Viet Nam’s INDC provided preliminary information on intended contributions until 2030.
The emission reduction component consists of conditional and unconditional contributions. Unconditional contributions are activities implemented with national resources, while conditional contributions are those implemented with financial, technological, and capacity building support from the international community.
Viet Nam’s biggest contribution to mitigating emissions will focus on transport and communication, agriculture and land use – and changes in using land and forestry, and waste.