16/08/2017
At the national online Conference on environmental protection, taking place on 24th August,2016, Việt Nam’s Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc said that it was necessary to change our thinking in environmental protection, considering environment as a mean to speed up sustainable development.
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Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc speaking at the Conference |
Gaps remain
Prime Minister acknowledged that although the Government of Việt Nam has been giving strong directions to tackle environmental issues, however, until now specific solutions at both central and local levels have not been found out.
Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc pointed out some big gaps in current environmental management. For example, environmental pollution is taking place in wide area, not in a specific area. Many complaints regarding environmental pollution made by a large number of people have been taking place in many locations. Today’s blast of environmental pollution is caused by accumulations in the past, over many years and during development process.
Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Trần Hồng Hà said that environmental protection in Việt Nam is facing with tremendous pressure from national socio-economic development. Each year, there are more than 2,000 investment projects that need to conduct environmental impact assessment in accordance with applicable laws.
The biggest environmental concerns are now happening in industrial development areas. Minister Trần Hồng Hà added that currently out of 615 industrial clusters, only 5% of them are provided with centralized wastewater treatment systems, while the rest are not and discharging wastewater directly into the environment.
Be careful with investment attraction at all cost
Minister Trần Hồng Hà pointed out some of current and future environmental threats. These threats are closely linked with economic development, investment attraction and scaling up of investment projects.
According to Minister Trần Hồng Hà, we should pay attention to the regime of calling for foreign direct investment at all cost, which can result in the trade off by serious environmental pollution. Due to the past attention to call for FDI, Việt Nam tends to loosen environmental protection standards in order to give better competitiveness than other countries in attracting foreign investments. In reality, some FDI enterprises have caused serious environmental pollution, namely Vedan, Miwon and Formosa, whose wastewater has caused sea environment pollution in 4 Central coastal provinces of Việt Nam, and Vĩnh Tân 2 thermal power plant which has caused smog and dust pollution...
Currently, FDI flows tend to move into sectors that consume a lot of energy, resources, human resources and are environmentally - unfriendly, such as metallurgy, ship building industry, garment and textiles, footwear, mineral exploitation and making use without linkage with specialized processing, pulp industry, chemical production, and food and farm product processing... All these fail to attract advanced and source technologies and technological transfer. Many enterprises even accept fines when they are found to cause environmental pollution and after that convict the same act of causing environmental pollution again.
In addition, foreign investors have taken advantage of the gaps in Vietnamese technical specifications/standards to bring in obsolete technologies, which overuses resources, energy and manpower in order to maximize their profit.
The Minister also warned that there are more and more big projects which have been issued with investment licenses but still lack of proper planning and assessment of potential environmental impacts. Environmental pollution prevention, control and response by investment projects have not received appropriate attention.
Comprehensive solutions are now needed
"The 4th industrial revolution is coming into shape very soon. If Việt Nam is slow in to act, the country may become a dump field for brow, obsolete and polluting technologies of the world", stressed Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Trần Hồng Hà.
In order to improve the situation, the Head of Natural Resources and Environment sector believed that it is necessary to focus on some key solutions. These include tightening of technical specifications, standards, environmental technical barriers; encouragement of advanced and clean technologies; streamlining of legal and institutional framework; and enhanced capacity of human resources...
For the long run, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment suggests that a ranking of environmental protection performance by localities should be established and implemented since 2017 and increased budget spending for such activity.
The Ministry also proposes that the National Assembly would supervise environmental protection performance of big investment projects which are approved by the National Assembly and Prime Minister and then assigned to provincial people’s councils to follow up with implementation.
Châu Long
