Vietnam's global warming challenge: navigating in the context of intensified extreme rainfall and worsening droughts

Vietnam, a dynamic developing nation and a major agricultural exporter, faces growing exposure to the dual threats of droughts and extreme rainfall under global warming. Designing efficient adaptation strategies in the face of these hazards requires detailed assessments of future changes in both types of extremes across the country. In order to inform evidence-based planning and decision-making, we provide spatially refined projections from state-of-the-art global climate models for different indicators of extreme rainfall and drought events. Despite significant uncertainties, the results suggest a general trend towards the intensification of extreme rainfall events but milder droughts at higher global warming levels. However, the general trends hide large differences among the climate models and the projections from a subset of models actually show worsening drought severity under worst-case climate scenarios.