Impact of Climate Change on Agricultural Production and Food Security: A Case Study in the Mekong River Delta of Vietnam

Vietnam is a country highly vulnerable to climate change. Specifically, climate change has seriously impacted all aspects of Vietnam’s economic and social life, especially agricultural production. In this article, we focus on analyzing the current situation and the impacts of climate change on agricultural production and food security in Vietnam, especially in the Mekong River Delta (MRD) region. Vietnam’s climate change scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP 8.5) have warned of serious increases in temperature, rainfall, and sea level rises for the MRD in coming times. This will lead to a risk of flooding in nearly 50% of the region’s area and will seriously affect agricultural production in many aspects such as soil quality degradation, scarcity of water resources, increased droughts and floods, reduced crop productivity, and so on. These impacts will reduce Vietnam’s food supply capacity, but do not compromise national food security from a short-term perspective. Faced with this situation, the Government of Vietnam has implemented many comprehensive measures to transform agriculture towards ecology, sustainability, and low carbon emissions, with the goal of green growth and neutral carbon emissions by 2050. In particular, the focus is on combining nature-based solutions with the application of modern science and technology in agricultural production, raising awareness and the response capacity of domestic people, with international cooperation in addressing climate change issues.