Facilitating integrated coastal management in Vietnam: final report

Abstract

Viet Nam's marine and coastal area extends over 1.5 million hectares with an Exclusive Economic Zone of about 1 million square kilometers. It also has 4,000 offshore islands mainly in the Gulf of Tonkin and various important coastal habitats such as large deltas (the Red River and Mekong River deltas), gulfs, lagoons and open coasts. Some 24,000 square kilometers of the coast, particularly in the central region, are low-lying lands constantly affected by tidal floods and typhoons. Its coastal zones support about 116th of its total population. The heavy effort in near shore fisheries greatly affected its coastal areas, with declines in fish landing in most coastal provinces. The need to provide operational and implementing capacities for the management of coastal resources by coastal stakeholders in the Southeast Asian region, specifically in Viet Nam where the poor feel the majority of destructive impacts was then operationalized into a training project. This report gives a summary of the training project.