Search

Science-based desirable solutions for mitigating and or reducing environmental pollution are of important priorities for many developed and developing countries. This article is conducted to better understand how well the inner-city citizens and foreigners perceive air pollution, how well they respond to it, and how much they willingly contribute to improving air quality in Vietnam, a lower-middle-income nation in Southeast Asia. During late 2019, a stratified random sampling technique and a contingent valuation method (CVM) were employed to survey 199 inhabitants and 75 foreigners who reside and travel within the inner-city of Hanoi, respectively. The data comprises four major groups of information, including (1) perception of air pollution and its impacts, (2) preventive measures used to mitigate polluted air, (3) commitments on willingness-to-pay (WTP) for reducing air pollution alongside reasons for the yes-or-no-WTP decision, and (4) demographic information of interviewees. The data could offer many attributes and policy implications for better economics and environmental management in the study area and or in similar places around the world.

The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic urges to seek advanced solutions to combat the disease and minimize its impacts on humankind and society. We employ a causal mechanism approach and develop a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) model to study successful pathways in curbing COVID-19 among 37 Asian countries. Structural variables of GDP per capita, governance, democracy, health access and quality alongside with two government response indexes from the real-time Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker are included as causal conditions in our QCA model. We identified a total of seven successful pathways, covering countries in different development stages. Regardless of income levels, we found democracy is essential in effectively controlling the pandemic. High democratic scores are characterized in five over seven pathways. Extensive testing and comprehensive contact tracing strategies have proved to be effective in containing COVID-19, especially in developed and emerging countries. Surprisingly, we found limited impacts of stringent containment measures such as gathering restricted and social distancing. We traced back to the early days of COVID-19, and by performing hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis, we learned that restrictive containment measures in the early days helped prevent the spread of the pandemic, especially in developing countries. In the context that democracy is in decline around the world, our empirical results suggest that democracy is still essential in controlling the disease. Also, countries in under-resourced settings can still effectively combat COVID-19 with appropriate and timely containment measures.

Vietnam’s forests have undergone major transformations since the 1990s, including a transition from net forest loss to net expansion, which is attributable to plantation forests and rehabilitated forests. Our study aimed to better understand the patterns and the causes of forest cover rehabilitation in Vietnam to expand tropical forests in other regions. We used geographic information system tools, a structural regression model and a random effects model based on official Government of Vietnam forest cover maps, and field surveys to quantify the extent of rehabilitated forests and its drivers at the local, commune, scale, in Dien Bien province, Vietnam. Results showed that around 118,000 hectares of forests were rehabilitated between 1990 and 2010. Rehabilitated forests comprised the largest share (above 84%) of total forest gain and this share increased from 1990-2000 to 2000-2010. Rehabilitated forests were associated with biophysical and accessibility conditions (elevation and road density). Expansion of rehabilitated forests was mainly driven by the presence of migration, lower population density, higher income, and the implementation of forestry policies. The empirical results offer policy implications for forest restoration practices as part of forest-based climate change mitigation programs as well as for environmental management, sustainable mountainous rural livelihood development in Vietnam and beyond.

Climate change gives rise to a growing threat of extinction to humankind, yet the current approach and solutions appear insufficient in addressing it effectively. This paper presents a critical review of the climate crisis and current approaches, highlighting how misguided would it be to exclude enterprises—the primary drivers of the climate problems—from top-down policy-making. In assessing the different core cultural values of environment-damaging and environment-protecting enterprises, the authors suggest embracing a new paradigm of environmentally-friendly cultural values. The new paradigm, which calls for a process of identifying, transforming, and synthesizing a set of core cultural values, serves as the cornerstone of the whole system and aims to shift the core cultural value from “exploitation” to “construction.” As environmentally-friendly cultural values can shape human progress away from capitalism/monetarism and toward environmentalism, it could be added to Harrison and Huntington’s (2001) list of human cultures as the 11th value. The paradigm comprises two mutually interacting attributes: (i) money cannot trade for environmental deficits, and (ii) environmental embellishment value needs to become a new “measure of profit,” priced at least on par with monetary value. The insights carry serious implications for policy-makers in engaging enterprises in the fight for a more habitable and sustainable planet.

Global climate change gives rise to a growing threat of extinction to mankind, yet the current approach and solutions have appeared to be insufficient to combat it effectively. We have critically reviewed and discussed the solutions pathways for the problem. Our key message in this short paper is that enterprises solely cause global environmental problems but underestimating their role in solving the problem could be a terrible mistake since they have a great amount of potential to solve the environmental problem. We nominate the environmental cultural value as the 11th human-culture because it can shape human progress towards “environmentalism”. The new environmental cultural value includes two mutually interacting attributes. First, money cannot trade for environmental deficits. Second, environmental embellishment value needs to become a new “measure of profit”, priced at least on par with monetary value. Perceiving and agreeing to the new environmental cultural values-based approach is hard, but vital. We confirm that the environmental cultural value transition and or transformation in enterprises may take time and request several mutually interacting conditions such as gracious and receptive attitude, no prejudice, big vision, and common interests. The insights of this paper could illustrate some policy implications to engage and harness incorporates imbued with the environmental cultural values for addressing global environmental climate change.

As a generation of &lsquo, digital natives,&rsquo, secondary students who were born from 2002 to 2010 have various approaches to acquiring digital knowledge. Digital literacy and resilience are crucial for them to navigate the digital world as much as the real world, however, these remain under-researched subjects, especially in developing countries. In Vietnam, the education system has put considerable effort into teaching students these skills to promote quality education as part of the United Nations-defined Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). This issue has proven especially salient amid the COVID&minus, 19 pandemic lockdowns, which had obliged most schools to switch to online forms of teaching. This study utilizes a dataset of 1061 Vietnamese students taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)&rsquo, s &ldquo, Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP)&rdquo, project and employed Bayesian statistics to explore the relationship between the students&rsquo, background and their digital abilities. Results show that economic status and parents&rsquo, level of education are positively correlated with digital literacy. Students from urban schools have only a slightly higher level of digital literacy than their rural counterparts, suggesting that school location may not be a defining explanatory element in the variation of digital literacy and resilience among Vietnamese students. Students&rsquo, digital literacy and, especially resilience, also have associations with their gender. Moreover, as students are digitally literate, they are more likely to be digitally resilient. Following SDG4, i.e., Quality Education, it is advisable for schools, and especially parents, to seriously invest in creating a safe, educational environment to enhance digital literacy among students.

Having geographical proximity and a high volume of trade with China, the first country to record an outbreak of the new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Vietnam was expected to have a high risk of transmission. However, as of 4 April 2020, in comparison to attempts to containing the disease around the world, responses from Vietnam are seen as prompt and effective in protecting the interests of its citizens, with 239 confirmed cases and no fatalities. This study analyzes the situation in terms of Vietnam's policy response, social media and science journalism. A self-made web crawl engine was used to scan and collect official media news related to COVID-19 between the beginning of January and April 4, yielding a comprehensive dataset of 14,952 news items. The findings shed light on how Vietnam-despite being under-resourced-has demonstrated political readiness to combat the emerging pandemic since the earliest days. Timely communication on any developments of the outbreak from the government and the media, combined with up-to-date research on the new virus by the Vietnamese science community, have altogether provided reliable sources of information. By emphasizing the need for immediate and genuine cooperation between government, civil society and private individuals, the case study offers valuable lessons for other nations concerning not only the concurrent fight against the COVID-19 pandemic but also the overall responses to a public health crisis., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) have received considerable scholarly attention over the last decade, and progress has been made towards quantifying their direct impacts. There is also a growing recognition of the importance of indirect effects of LSLAs, such as ‘spillover’ or indirect land-use change (iLUC), and the substantial challenges they pose for attribution and quantification. In fact, the relative contributions of direct and indirect LUC associated with LSLAs are unknown. This study aims to address these knowledge gaps using Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) in Cambodia, now the most targeted country for LSLAs in Southeast Asia. We leverage findings on archetypical pathways of direct and indirect LUC in Cambodia, developed through previous mixed-methods synthesis efforts, to quantify remotely sensed forest loss to specific ELCs. During 2000–2016, Cambodia roughly 1611 kha of forest, or 22% of total forest cover. Although ELCs (as of 2016) contained roughly 16% of Cambodia’s forest cover (2000), forest lost within ELC boundaries accounted for nearly 30% (476 kha) of total forest lost by 2016. Furthermore, iLUC contributed an additional 49–174 kha of forest loss (3.0%–10.7% of all forest lost in Cambodia) over the same period. Thus, iLUC contributed to Cambodia’s total forest loss at the rate of 11.4%–40.8% of direct LUC caused by ELCs. Such findings suggest that the total amount of LUC caused by LSLAs may well be underestimated globally. This and related synthesis research efforts can be valuable approaches for better targeting remote sensing analyses to specific locations and time periods needed to disentangle and quantify forest loss due to direct and indirect land change processes.

Climate change is a pressing global issue and it negatively affects many developing countries, including Vietnam. To help Vietnam effectively respond to this pressing challenge, the country has recently introduced a major program for reducing carbon emissions arising from deforestation and forest degradation, fostering conservation, managing forests sustainably, and enhancing forest carbon stocks (REDD+). Current policies in Vietnam provide a sound platform for the development of REDD+, and REDD+ can potentially greatly contribute to the reduction of deforestation and forest degradation. However, these policies and the REDD+ program are hindered by limited understanding of the extent of deforestation and forest degradation and their underlying causes. This study employed geographic information system (GIS) tools, a structural regression model (structural model), and a regression tree method to quantify the extent as well as the approximate causes of deforestation and forest degradation in Vietnam. Results show that around 1.77 and 0.65 million ha of forests were lost and degraded, respectively, between 2000 and 2010. Deforestation and forest degradation were most notable in the north central, northeast, central highland, and northwest areas of the nation. There were several underlying indicators of deforestation and forest degradation including initial forest cover, per capita income, agricultural production, governance, population growth, food, and poverty. Our results illustrate several important policy implications for forest restoration and the REDD+ program in Vietnam: Vietnam should focus most strongly on reducing poverty, preserving existing forests, improving provincial-level governance, and controlling population growth.

In the global South, a rush of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) is occurring by governments and transnational and domestic investors seeking to secure access to land in developing countries to produce food, biofuels, and other agricultural commodities. Complex interactions between regional and global market dynamics and local institutional, socioeconomic, and agro-ecological conditions can lead to widely varying causal processes, land-use change (LUC), and socioeconomic and environmental outcomes. Systematic understanding of how characteristics of LSLAs across multiple social and environmental contexts produce spillover effects on local communities, ranging from employment opportunities to displacement and indirect land-use change (iLUC), is lacking. We conceptualize agricultural commodity production and land-acquisition processes associated with LSLAs as catalyzing causal pathways of direct and indirect land-use changes. Using the case of economic land concessions (ELCs) in Cambodia, we employed a novel synthesis research approach combining remote sensing, spatio-temporal statistics, and case study meta-analysis to construct archetypical pathways of the causes, timing, and consequences of ELC-driven land change. Archetypical pathways generally diverged based on specialized or flex commodity crops and rates of direct LUC, and rapid rates of direct LUC tended to cause displacement and iLUC. In contrast, ELCs producing commodity crops associated with more gradual land-use change and/or organized local resistance lead to less iLUC. Systematic knowledge generated through synthesis of local causes and consequences of LSLA-driven land change is now possible and needed to better address the direct and indirect consequences of LSLAs for commodity crop production.

Currently, gaming is the world's favorite form of entertainment. Various studies have shown how games impact players' perceptions and behaviors, prompting opportunities for purposes beyond entertainment. This study uses Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH)—a real-time life-simulation game—as a unique case study of how video games can affect humans' environmental perceptions. A dataset of 584 observations from a survey of ACNH players and the Hamiltonian MCMC technique have enabled us to explore the relationship between in-game behaviors and perceptions. Here we show a probabilistic trend towards exploiting the in-game environment despite players' perceptions, suggesting that the simplification of commercial game design may overlook opportunities to engage and educate players in pro-environmental activities.

Increased urbanization coupled with increased reliance of urban communities on rural areas for ecosystem service provision is a challenge faced by many nations. The ability of urban households to directly support restoration efforts in surrounding rural regions represents an underappreciated funding stream for ecological restoration. This study explored the willingness of urban households to support forest restoration in Vietnam. We surveyed 211 households (HHs) in the capital city Hanoi, Vietnam. A Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) model allowed us to obtain the parameters of our model and quantify mean Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) for a program of forest restoration in addition to identifying factors influencing the decision of WTP. Generally, over forty percent of the households surveyed are willing to pay for forest restoration and the mean value of WTP is 37,830 VND ($1.73) per household per month. WTP depends on endogenous and exogenous factors including level of education, income, female-to-male ratio in the household, attitude toward payment for monthly electricity consumption, and awareness of payment for environmental service. Our results suggest that urban household’s demand for forest restoration is real, and represents an untapped source of restoration funding. Policy-makers should take actions to apply charges on water bills to turn this potential into reality for restoration projects in Vietnam if the benefits from restoration outweigh the costs based on our findings.

Vietnam&rsquo, s forests have experienced a notable transformation over the past 20 years from net deforestation to reforestation and expanding forests. Continued reforestation that aims to achieve further economic and environmental benefits remains a national priority and strategy. We explore the current status of plantation forests and highlight possible means to facilitate their expansion in the uplands of Vietnam. We employ mixed method triangulation to empirically explore plantation forests and their economic role in household livelihood, to quantify trade-offs between plantation forests and shifting cultivation, and to assess the constraints on plantation forest expansion in Nghe An province, north-central Vietnam. Results show that forest in the study area expanded by 406,000 ha (71.1%) between 1990 and 2016. Plantation forests increased by nearly 500% (from 32,000 ha to 190,000 ha), while natural forests expanded by 48.1% (from 538,000 ha to 797,000 ha). Plantation forests contributed an average of 35.1 percent of total household income in wealthier households and 27.9 percent of income in poor households. Switching from shifting cultivation to plantation forests would increase total household income and average carbon stock but decrease food provision. Total Economic Value would be higher for plantation forest scenarios if increased carbon stocks in plantations can be monetized. This carbon income might drive conversion of shifting cultivation to plantation forests. Constraints on further expansion of plantation forest are low external cooperation, education, market stability, and agroforestry extension services. Our empirical results inform national plantation forest development, sustainable upland livelihood development, and climate change mitigation programs to ultimately facilitate forest transition and improve the resilience and sustainability of socio-ecological systems.

This study aims to fill a gap in the literature by examining the impacts of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in Vietnam, as the policy has been discussed for a decade in the country but the likely impacts on the economy and different sectors are still unidentified. The simulations are carried out in a global energy computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, an extension of the GTAP-E model, which treats Vietnam as a country region. Results show that restricting the number of industrial sectors in the emissions trading market substantially affects the country's economy with a decline in real GDP by 4.57%. However, the country experiences much smaller adverse impacts (e.g., real GDP declines by 1.78%) when all industries participate in the emissions trading market. In either case of the ETS design, the coal mining, manufacturing, transportation, and electricity sectors are highly adversely affected; however, the crude oil and natural gas extraction sectors would experience expansion in their production levels due to substitutions for coal. In general, under the policy the emission levels from burning fossil fuels decline at significant rates, particularly from the electricity generation sector.