Vietnam is among the top ten countries most affected by weather-related loss events, Akiko Fujii, the UNDP deputy country director in Vietnam, told a climate change workshop in Hanoi on Tuesday.

Citing statistics from the Global Risk Index 2017, she added that since the 1970s more than 500 deaths occur annually in Vietnam as a direct result of natural disasters, costing the country over 1.5 percent of its GDP in economic loss.

Fujii’s statement came during an inter-ministerial workshop on the evaluation of climate change impacts in Vietnam.

The workshop, which runs for two days on June 6 and 7 in Hanoi, is hosted by Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in coordination with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Nearly 100 delegates and international experts in climate change, disaster prevention, and impact evaluation attended the event.

The workshop focused on updating climate change impacts within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), raising the awareness of parties about financial risk in the context of climate change, and exploring the tools to manage these risks.

Experts and environment officials also discussed approaches toward the evaluation of climate change impacts in a number of fields, including agriculture and water resource management, while also analyzing Vietnam’s environmental policies.

“The workshop is a good opportunity to discuss mutual interests, practical experiences and useful policies to calculate, assess, and evaluate the impacts of climate change,” said Hoang Van Thang, Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, at Tuesday’s workshop.

Thang stressed that Vietnam needed the tools and methodologies to identify and assess the impacts of climate change on its socio-economic development in order to take a more proactive stance in disaster prevention and mitigation.

“While the terms of loss and damage are commonly defined in Vietnam as past and present economic costs, good global practice emphasizes the need for countries like Vietnam to plan and account for future loss and damage too,” Akiko Fujii said in her speech at Tueday’s workshop.

“Recent evidence based on the extreme drought and the El-Nino during 2015-2016 suggests that millions of Vietnamese farmers suffered massive losses and the country’s economy was equally affected.”

“If no mechanism exists to deal with long-term climate patterns, social and economic development gains in Vietnam will rapidly diminish,” she stressed.

The UNDP deputy country director claimed that it was important for Vietnam to identify a rigorous method of assessing and understanding climate loss and damage, as a full understanding of both present and long term future climate change risks was essential in helping government and other stakeholders plan and adjust policies to reduce the impact of inevitable losses.

“I hope, with insights from regional good practice, Vietnam will begin to introduce tools for financial climate risk management,” Fujii said.

“The challenge ahead is formidable. And there is no time to lose.”

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