05/03/2020
Environmental monitoring plays an important role in the State management of environmental protection. The environmental monitoring aims to provide data on the current environmental quality state and assess the activities of discharging into the environment, thereby contributing to supporting the relevant agencies in implementing the environmental management function. Many countries and regions around the world have paid attention to the development of environmental monitoring networks to assess the developments, provide warnings and develop appropriate management options.
In Việt Nam, the environmental monitoring work is also always concerned and closely directed. The context of the country’s strong development and increasing industrial production, business and service activities has been creating great pressure on the environment, requiring the development of environmental monitoring networks to carry out monitoring on a regular and continuous basis to assess developments and provide environmental warnings to the community and regulatory agencies.
The development process of environmental monitoring network plannings in Việt Nam
After many years of implementation and operation, the environmental monitoring network in Việt Nam has developed, meeting the increasing demands of the State management of environmental protection. With the current coordinating role of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE), the environmental monitoring station network has been increasingly expanded and effectively promoted the potential resources of facilities, technology and human resources of many agencies, industries and research institutes such as the Ministries of Education and Training, Science and Technology, Agriculture and Rural Development, National Defense, Industry and Trade, Health, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology.
Automatically continuous wastewater monitoring station of Trà Đa Industrial Park (Gia Lai)
From 1994 to 2006, a number of Ministries/sectors and localities formed the environmental monitoring network. However, there has been no agreement on methods, processes, parameters, frequency of monitoring, some programs have not guaranteed the right time and place of monitoring as planned. Moreover, with limited budget, outdated equipment and limited staff capacity, the results of monitoring are inconsistent both in space and time, the reliability is not high, sometimes conflicting with each other, which is difficult to analyze, synthesize and use generally. The monitoring results have not been gathered to the national environmental management agency. The environmental monitoring has not met the actual requirements of environmental management and protection in the period of accelerating industrialization and modernization of the country.
Stemming from the above practical needs, on January 29th, 2007, the Prime Minister approved Decision No. 16/2007/QD-TTg on the Master planning on the national network on natural resources and environmental monitoring to 2020, to set general goals such as: To build a national network on natural resources and environmental monitoring to ensure consistency across the country, synchronization, innovation and modernity to meet the needs of collecting and providing basic survey information and data on environment, water resources, hydrometeorology, effectively serving the treatment and remediation of environmental pollution, forecasts, warnings, prevention, avoidance and mitigation of damage caused by natural disasters and the strong and sustainable socio-economic development of the country. At the same time, the Decision also points out specific objectives for each stage, focusing on issues of developing and perfecting the organizational structure, management and administration apparatus; strengthening equipment and human resources for the natural resources and environmental monitoring network. Although there are general provisions in a separate chapter in the Law on Environmental Protection and the Prime Minister has signed promulgated Decision No. 16/2007/QD-TTg, the actual management and operation of the national environmental monitoring network, environmental statistics, publication and disclosure of environmental information over the past time show that there are still many shortcomings and failures to meet the increasing requirements of environmental management.
On January 12th, 2016, the Prime Minister approved Decision No. 90/QD-TTg on the Planning of the national natural resources and environmental monitoring network in the period of 2016 - 2025, with a vision to 2030, replacing Decision No. 16/2007/QD-TTg with the objective to Develop a rational, synchronous and modern national natural resources and environmental monitoring system of leading level in Southeast Asia and the advanced level of Asia; meeting the needs of basic survey information for the State management of water, land, sea and island resources, hydrometeorology, environmental protection and other technical and economic sectors; serving forecasting, warning, preventing and mitigating damage caused by natural disasters and environmental pollution, climate change response.
In order to synchronously and effectively implement the Prime Minister's Decision No. 90/QD-TTg, the Minister of MONRE also issued Decision No. 2044/QD-BTNMT on September 7th, 2016 on the five-year Plan on implementing the Planning of the national natural resources and environmental monitoring network. Since the issuance of Decision No. 90/QD-TTg, the MONRE has always been active and proactive in implementing the Planning.
Implementation of the plannings
Currently, the Vietnam Environment Administration (VEA) has sufficient capacity to carry out the monitoring according to the Planning for environmental components, including: Surface water (coastal sea water and river water), air quality, sediment, implementing monitoring programs in key economic regions and river basins: Nhuệ - Đáy, Cầu, Đồng Nai, Mã, Hồng - Thái Bình, Đà and Vu Gia - Thu Bồn, areas of bauxite mining in the Central Highlands. To invest, maintain and operate the system of automatic air monitoring stations in Hà Nội, Đà Nẵng, Khánh Hòa and soon in Thừa Thiên - Huế, Phú Thọ, Quảng Ninh...; to enhance and install automatic water monitoring stations in Thái Nguyên, Bắc Ninh, Hà Nội, Thừa Thiên - Huế...
In addition to the national environmental monitoring network managed by the VEA, there are a number of environmental monitoring networks managed by other units under the MONRE, such as the air and water environmental monitoring network developed by the Vietnam Meteorological and Hydrological Administration (formerly), now the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting (MONRE). This network of stations carrying out the air environmental monitoring is integrated with meteorological stations; the lake and river water environmental monitoring is integrated with hydrographic stations. In addition, there are also saline intrusion monitoring points in estuaries carried out by hydrographic stations...
In addition to the results achieved in recent years, the work of planning on environmental monitoring in our country still faces many difficulties and shortcomings. The system of automatic and continuous air and water environmental monitoring stations is still incomplete according to the National Planning on environmental monitoring network approved by Decision No. 90/QD-TTg due to the high cost of investing, maintaining and operating automatic monitoring stations, many provinces have difficulty in funding and maintaining stations. For periodic monitoring activities that are only carried out at certain times of the year, many monitoring programs have not been implemented according to the desired plan. The sharing of information and data on environmental monitoring among the Central and localities is still limited. On the other hand, the environmental database of the whole system currently does not meet the requirements of environmental management in the control, monitoring and warning of environmental developments and especially when major environmental pollution incidents occur. Besides, the requirement for access to environmental information by the society today requires more and more timely and enough information that thoroughly reflects the current state of the environment. The resources for environmental monitoring and analysis are increasing in quantity, but still not meeting the practical requirements in terms of both quantity and quality. The localities have invested in equipment that have not yet been synchronized. Some units have equipment that has been invested for a long time, so they are old and broken down, or have new equipment, but there is no synchronization on the categories and the technical specifications of the equipment...
Orientation in the coming time
According to Clause 12, Article 7 of the Law amending and supplementing 37 Laws related to the Planning No. 35/2018/QH14 passed by the National Assembly on November 19th, 2018, the MONRE is tasked with formulating and valuating and submitting to the Prime Minister for approval the National Master Plan for Environmental Monitoring to meet new requirements to better serve management. Different from previous plannings where the environmental monitoring is integrated into the network of natural resources and meteorological meteorology, the coming Planning is specifically developed for the environment field.
The development of this Planning is based on the principle of inheriting the previous environmental monitoring plannings approved in Decision No. 16/2007/QD-TTg and Decision No. 90/2016/QD-TTg, showing the orientation in the planning of stations, monitoring points and towards strengthening socialization in mobilizing resources to implement the environmental monitoring programs in the planning. The new planning will contribute to updating the monitoring points, strengthening the mechanism for mobilizing resources for environmental monitoring activities and contributing to promoting the environmental monitoring activities to meet requirements in the new development period of the country.
Trương Mạnh Tuấn
Vietnam Environment Administration
(Source: Vietnam Environment Administration Magazine, English Edition III - 2019)
