The country approved a national green growth strategy in 2012. The strategy, which has a vision until 2050, identifies three key tasks – reducing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting clean and renewable energy, and practicing environmentally-friendly production and consumption.
34 provinces and cities have formulated action plans on green growth
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Besides, all cities and provinces nation-wide have incorporated green growth into local development plans and climate change action plans.
Policies on investment attraction in green growth were also introduced and lured many foreign and domestic investors, Mai said.
Despite the achievements, expert Le Duc Chung said the implementation of green growth in some ministries, agencies and localities has been still restricted. Their awareness of the importance of incorporating green growth into development plans of localities also remained limited.
Chung attributed the shortcoming to the limitation of policies and regulations in implementing green growth. Besides, the cooperation between ministries and agencies in the green growth hasn’t been strong enough to encourage the participation of firms and people.
In addition, Le Hoang Anh from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development admitted that it is hard to incorporate local socio-economic development plans to green growth. She took the program on fighting against climate change as an example, saying that the incorporation of the program with green growth is very difficult as they have different targets.
For green growth strategies to achieve more positive results, experts said there should be more closely coordination among ministries, agencies and localities as there was overlapping between them.
Besides, they proposed some measures for localities, like restructuring agricultural production towards green growth, increasing connection between production, processing and preservation industries, developing production models in harmony with the environment that match actual conditions in the locality.
Development interventions should be of high feasibility in line with available resources and development strategies of each locality, while leaders of relevant ministries and agencies need to allocate resources effectively and reasonably to localities.
Le Viet Thai of the German International Co-operation Organization (GIZ), suggested that technological solutions be applied to improve labor productivity and use natural resources effectively and economically.
Economist Nguyen Thi Kim Dung said community participation and capacity as well as financial feasibility should be paid due attention when implementing the national green growth strategy.
Other experts recommended that localities study and assess their environment situation, level of pollution and build roadmaps to deal with issues relating to waste treatment and production in line with green growth targets.
They should also invest tangibly in knowledge-building, communication and advocacy, accelerate regulatory action and promote environmentally-friendly consumer behavior, they said.
