VACNE's President: Need to create mechanism to exploit community knowledge for country’s environment protection and sustainable development *
* This is the content of the speech of Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Sinh, VACNE’s President, at the working meeting of Mr. Nguyen Phu Trong, Party’s Secretary General, with the Vietnam Union of Scientific and Technological Associations (VUSTA) on 13 August 2011.
“Recently, issues of environment protection, sustainable development, climate change, and environmental safety receive more and more concern. Vietnam intellectual forces are contributing a great effort with the community nation wide.
Being personally involved in environmental governance from the beginning, I would like to mention an aspect that I consider as very important for promoting knowledge as well as the Vietnam intellectual forces in the future.
There is a technical term of “indigenous knowledge” which means a community knowledge attached to plants and animals in a locality. Vietnam is blessed with bio-diversity and rich natural resources. Therefore, our indigenous knowledge is also abundant. Regrettably, it has not been exploited properly and due to many reasons, it gradually falls into oblivion. There are even some warnings about “resources curse”, which means that being rich with resources is unfortunate.
The Vietnam Association for Conservation of Nature and Environment (VACNE) did a lot of research on this issue and recently had sent an official request to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) to complete and submit to the Government a “Decree on raising the role of community in country’s environmental protection and sustainable development” for its early promulgation. Based on current theory and in line with the Declaration of the UN Summit on sustainable development, our research has addressed 4 main contents with the aim to promote community, including intellectual forces, as follows:
- To ensure the provision of information fully, multi-directed, regularly, continuously, and stipulated by legal regulations.
- To provide for community to participate in and to have initiative in environment protection. The activities that community can perform by themselves including scientific research, organizing events, communication to raise awareness, advocacy, etc. in the field of environment should be handed over fully to them.
- To ensure the equality in justice for all groups of citizens, and
- To provide for raising community’s capacity so that they can perform relevant activities.
To the Party’s leadership, we wish to request that in this term the Party’s Central Committee would study and issue a Resolution at a central level on issues related to environment protection, sustainable development, responses to climate change, and ensuring environmental safety, in which mechanisms to exploit the most community knowledge and the role of intellectual forces are clearly laid out.”
VACNE Office