Pacific Geographies (Mar 2009)
Climate Change and Challenges for the Urban Development of Ho Chi Minh City / Vietnam
Abstract
The latest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and different other scientific sources confirm that climate change is no longer a “distant possibility but a current reality” (World Bank 2008). Although Vietnam has only played a tiny part in creating the problems of global environmental change, it is among the countries most seriously affected by this threatening development (Waibel 2008). Already in the past decades, a significant rise in weather extremes such as tropical typhoons and flooding events as a consequence of climate change has been observed there. Climate change and urban development are closely interlinked and often interact negatively (Wamsler 2008: 96). In this paper, the authors analyze sector- and spatial-level-specificdangers of climate change for the most prosperous city and firstmega-urban region of Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Thereby, a dual-track approach to dealing with climate impacts will be proposed consisting of adaptation and mitigation.
