Agriculture in Viet Nam under the impact of climate change

Over the past 30 years, strong agricultural growth has changed the socio-economic status of Viet Nam: improving food security, boosting agricultural exports, and creating livelihoods for people. However, the agricultural sector has already been impacted by climate change, and projections for the next few decades indicate that the climate warming trends and anthropogenic pressures are likely to be accelerated. In this chapter, we examine evolution in crop yields in the past decades, and its predicted evolution in the future. The results vary widely between crops, agro-ecological zones and climate scenarios, but most findings concur on the decline of crop yields in the 2030–2050 horizon. On the other hand, the habitat suitability for rice and other major crops will undergo drastic changes. We find that without adaptation, the risks of increasing saline intrusion, and that of permanent inundation due to sea level rise, will significantly reduce (up to 50% by 2050) the land suitable for rice cultivation in the Mekong delta . However, these two main threats to rice cultivation are accentuated by anthropogenic pressures (ground water pumping and sand mining), which require specific policies to be mitigated. Among the adaptation practices, we highlight practices that mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. In particular, the Alternate Wetting and Drying irrigation of rice fields is a single mitigation practice that can reduce the methane emissions from rice fields in Viet Nam by 40%. However, to derive adaptation and mitigation measures for the agriculture sector over the coming decades will require assessments against a background of wider environmental, economic and social evolutions.