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Vietnam needs to brace for rising sea levels: top scientist

Vietnam will have to upgrade its sea defenses to brace for rising ocean levels and even stronger typhoons caused by global warming, state media cited a senior scientist as saying on Thursday.

The country must spend more than US$600 million until 2020 to reinforce and raise sea dykes between central Quang Ngai and southern Kien Giang provinces, the water resources expert said, the official Vietnam News daily reported.

Work is needed on about 520km of sea dykes and over 320km of river dykes that are unable to resist flood tides and storms, Southern Institute of Water Resources director Le Manh Hung said.

Vietnam has more too lose from climate change than almost any other country, facing a risk on a par with some island-states and low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

With a 3,200km coastline and two of the largest low-lying river deltas in the world, Vietnam tops the world's developing countries in the risk it faces from climate change, the World Bank warned.

"Scientific evidence is now overwhelming" that climate change and rising sea levels are real threats, and the impact on Vietnam would be "potentially catastrophic," the World Bank said in a report last year.

If sea levels rose 5m because of a breakup of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, this would impact 16 percent of Vietnam's land area, second only to the Bahamas out of the 84 countries surveyed, it said.

Most of the impact would be in Vietnam's "rice bowls" and population and industrial centers -- the southern Mekong delta and the northern Red River delta.

One-third of Vietnam's people would be affected by a 5m sea level rise, the bank said, while a 1m rise would affect 10.8 percent of its people.

The World Conservation Union has also said climate change was "a critical issue for Vietnam" that threatens crop failures, biodiversity loss and damage to wetlands, coral reefs and other critical ecosystems.
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