Vietnam’s Future Under A Warming World: The Growing Challenge of Heat Stress

As global warming intensifies, Vietnam is expected to experience more frequent and intense extreme heat events in the coming decades. Designing efficient adaptation strategies in the face of these growing hazards requires assessments of future changes in hot extremes across the country. In order to offer essential guidance for policymakers to develop effective heat stress adaptation and mitigation strategies, we have studied future changes of different hot extreme indicators across Vietnam for different climate change scenarios, using two different methodologies. The results show that extreme heat conditions will intensify and could occur up to several months per year in some regions at high global warming levels. Hence, extreme heat exposure will be a significant threat to health and labor productivity in Vietnam and could have severe socio-economic consequences. We emphasize the urgent need for proactive planning and targeted adaptation measures.