The
workshop was chaired by the Vice Minister of MARD – Mr. Hoang Van Thang
and Chairman of Ninh Thuan People’s
Committee – Mr. Luu Xuan Vinh.
Attending the workshop, on the side of international delegates,
there were Worldbank,Cologne
University of Applied Sciences (Germany), Bangladesh and Indonesia Natural
Resources Network, Pacific Disaster Center, and The
Global Water Partnership. On the side of Vietnam, there were participants
from MARD, Water Resources Directorate, VAWR, and representatives of Ninh
Thuan, Binh Thuan, Khanh Hoa, Gia Lai, and DakLak Provinces.
The purpose of the workshop was to improve the capacity of
monitoring, forecasting, and managing drought; looking forwards to building
more appropriate policies and strategies from national level and regional level
as well as action plans for each locality in the South Centreal and Central
Highlands regions.
Opening speech at the workshop, the Vice Minister of MARD
said: ‘The perspective that Vietnam is approach in managing drought is an
overall sustainable perspective because drought is simply an imbalance of water
,so drought management is inseparable from integrated river basin management
from upstream to downstream to ensure that water is fully supplied for water
users in the most effective and sustainable manner. If this is well executed
then risks and damages caused by drought will be minimized’.
He also said the content of the Workshop
agenda includes drought management framework, and tools and methods used to
predict and monitor drought are issues that the Goverment of Vietnam and MARD
have been including in to execute in the near future especially, issues closely
related to drought’s impacts on agriculture sector including drought risk
prediction and forecasting capacity in the short term, medium term as well as
long term, and especially risk prevention and miligation due to drought
approaching from river basin level in order to serve the restructuring of
Vietnam’s agriculture sector.
At the workshop, Director of VAWR – Mr.
Nguyen Vu Viet said: VAWR has been applying new approach methods as well as the
international advanced technology to predict and warn drought risks in a
scientific way, closely tied to serve agricultural production by using all of
calculation findings from global and regional climate models, and crops
modeling then from there, propose appropriate plant structure and reasonable
water distribution plan calculated on the basis of water balance in river
basins to serve sustainable agricultural production in the region where water
shortage and drought are being more and more serious.
Through this Workshop, we hoped Vietnam
specifically provinces in the South Central and Central Highlands, and
international organizations having specific strategies as well as actions to
improve cooperation and knowledge exchange in the fight against potential
impacts which can easily happen due to drought, particularly in the context of
climate change which is getting more complicated as today.
End of the
Workshop, MARD has appreciated the cooperation between VAWR and international
partners. The Ministry requested the toolkit for drought forecast of Pacific
Disaster Center and Integrated Drought Management framework developed by VAWR
needs to be updating and closely coordinate with localities to proactively
prevent drought. In the future, there’s a need of more research of calculating
a reasonable allocation of water and water pricing.