07 November 2018

Air quality management in Vietnam

The collaborative research project on air quality management in Vietnam being carried out jointly by IIASA and its Vietnamese National Member Organization, the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST), reached an important milestone at the end of October with the publication of the first year's progress report.

© Z. Klimont

© Z. Klimont

A cooperative scientific project between the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) and IIASA has spawned a multi-disciplinary research community in Vietnam that can provide comprehensive scientific support on air quality management to decision makers in Vietnam. During the first year of the project, IIASA’s GAINS model has been adapted to the Greater Ha Noi/Red River Delta area and surrounding regions, and an initial set of data has been compiled from publicly available statistics and studies. The report on this phase of the project was presented at a workshop held in Hanoi on 26 October 2018, which also marked the formal launch of the GAINS-Vietnam model. This event was covered on the Vietnamese television news.

Research Findings

Although further work will be necessary to refine the GAINS-Vietnam tool, the initial findings are highly relevant for air quality management in Vietnam.

The measured annual mean concentrations of PM2.5 are clearly above the national ambient air quality standards, and exceed the global guideline value of the World Health Organization by a wide margin. Based on local emission inventories and meteorological information, the analysis reveals that road traffic is the major but, in contrast to widespread belief, not the dominating source of PM2.5 pollution in the Ha Noi province. Road transport is responsible for about one quarter of the ambient PM2.5, the other 75% originating from other sectors, notably large power and industrial plants, the residential sector and the open burning of agricultural waste. Livestock farming and fertilizer application make important contributions to the chemical formation of secondary particles.


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Last edited: 16 January 2021

CONTACT DETAILS

Zbigniew Klimont

Research Group Leader and Principal Research Scholar Pollution Management Research Group - Energy, Climate, and Environment Program

IIASA Activities with Vietnam

Access to the online model

Future air quality in Ha Noi and northern Vietnam

Publications

Nguyen B.T., Gomez Sanabria A., Karner M., Truong A.H. (2018)
CraftQuest- Mobile App for collecting Craft Village Data. FICTA 2018. (accepted for publication). Springer, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (AISC)

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