Residents navigate by boats on a flooded street after typhoon Ketsana struck the tourist town of Hoi An

The UN official was speaking at the Vietnam National Forum on Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation in Hanoi on Wednesday, which attracted officials from the highest levels of government, international agencies working on climate change reduction in the country and representatives from 20 provincial flood and storm control steering committees.

“We need to be very clear that these losses can be reduced,” Wahlstrom said. “We need to be very clear also that it is in our power to control many of the factors that lead to disasters.”

The country has been identified as among the world’s five countries worst affected by climate change effects. If sea levels rise one meter, some 10 percent of Vietnam’s population will be directly affected, 10 percent of its

GDP will be lost and about 40,000 kilometers of its coastal areas will be inundated, according to the three climate change scenarios released in August by the government.

Vietnam has implemented serious measures to battle the effects of climate change, including the approval of the National Target Program to respond to climate change and a national strategy for natural disaster prevention, response and mitigation through 2020, according to Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai.

But Wahlstrom emphasized that “we cannot keep focusing on response” while neglecting the root causes of disasters. That includes tasks such as improving disaster preparedness, establishing risk maps and early warning systems, and incorporating climate adaptation and risk reduction in policy planning and national socio-economic plans.

Allaster Cox, Australian Ambassador to Vietnam, suggested Vietnam combine its action plans on disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation to ensure greater policy coherence.

“For every dollar spent on disaster risk reduction, around US$7 are saved in avoided or reduced response and recovery costs,” Cox said.

Nguyen Xuan Dieu, general director of dike management, flood and storm control unit under the Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Development, said there were still many shortcomings in the government’s disaster management and mitigation efforts, such as slow response times, a lack of staff at the local level and weak forecasting and warning systems.

“We can’t just leave the residents in the dark when disasters approach,” Dieu said at the forum.

According to Dieu, the implementation of the national strategy, which was approved in late September and could cost up to VND250 trillion (US$14 billion), also aims to boost “non-structural” measures.

For example, it includes plans such as educating more than 70 percent of the population in 6,000 disaster-prone communes nationwide about disaster prevention, improving forecasting and warning capacities, and also implementing long-term measures such as forests planting and environmental protection.

However, the key for countries, according to Wahlstrom, was moving from “talking” to “action.”

“We’re going to have to live with more extreme weather,” she said. “Climate change is not a short-term environmental problem. It will seriously change the risk landscape and will preoccupy civil society and governments for the foreseeable future.”