How one Vietnamese farming village is adapting to climate change
Record summer heat and winter cold, delayed rains and intense storms have disrupted agriculture in northern Vietnam, while drought and saltwater intrusion have wreaked havoc in the Mekong Delta
At about five o’clock each morning, loudspeakers crackle on in Ma Village, Vietnam (population: 731). Mounted on concrete poles atop hills – a remnant of the 1950s information and propaganda apparatus – these loudspeakers, rather than the smartphones popular with Hanoi’s young office workers, are what provide locals in this mountain village with important news bulletins.
In the hour before sunrise, as farmers prepare to leave for their fields, village chief Nguyen Van Tam reads out weather updates and planting directives from the local meteorological bureau. In recent years, these once-routine broadcasts have contained increasingly bizarre information.
Forecasting is important – we have to be flexible
In January, for instance, when northern Vietnam saw its coldest temperatures on record, dipping below freezing in the mountains, Nguyen urged farmers to “keep your buffalos and cows in the shed – do not take them to the field”, he recalls. As the strange frigid spell continued, he warned villagers to delay transplanting paddy rice, lest seedlings perish in the cold.
The previous summer, when he informed the community of record high temperatures amid an ongoing heat wave, there was little to be done to protect crops already in the ground. And last November, when heavy rains fell during what is usually the dry season, he could only describe the extent of the flooding that soaked and destroyed a hectare of maize.
Sitting at a wooden table in the village community hall in late March, below a portrait of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, Nguyen, a congenial 58-year-old wearing a black sports jacket and baseball cap, explains that his duties as an elected official now include “teaching about climate risk”. He knows that global weather systems are shifting – the past year’s temperature extremes and unusual downpours in Vietnam are the result of a combination of climate change and El Nino – and that this has immediate, sometimes devastating, effects on the 192 households in his village, mostly farming families in concrete homes with palm-frond roofs.