Environmental Sustainability in Vietnam: Piloting the Environmental Sustainability Gap Framework (ESGAP) and Strong Environmental Sustainability Index (SESI)

The Prime Minister of Vietnam issued a National Action Plan for the implementation of the Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development. Nevertheless, the limited number of indicators and data, and the lack of a nation-wide monitoring system jeopardizes the country’s ability to effectively measure and monitor the state of the environment in a robust way. Better monitoring, better data and better co-ordination between agencies and Government Ministries are still major challenges to effectively monitor performance towards achieving the Vietnam’s SDG targets. 

This study pilots the assessment of strong environmental sustainability in Vietnam using the Environmental Sustainability Gap framework (ESGAP), and the Strong Environmental Sustainability Index (SESI), which measures countries’ performance on maintaining four essential environmental functions (i.e., source, sink, life support and human health and welfare). The ESGAP framework is relevant to identify Vietnam’s remaining environmental challenges to achieve strong environmental sustainability and data gaps in the country.

The study found that out of 22 strong environmental sustainability indicators present in the ESGAP framework, five have data available in Vietnam, eight have insufficient data sources and were replaced by proxy indicators for Vietnam, and the remaining nine represent major data gaps on the environment for Vietnam. The Vietnam ESGAP framework has the potential to be leveraged as an effective communication tool which provides an overall picture of the gap to achieve environmental sustainability.