Conversations on Vietnam Development
Tiếp tục đọc “Hạn mặn khốc liệt ở miền Tây: 5 tỉnh công bố tình huống khẩn cấp”
English: Choke point: Vietnam’s skilled labour shortage
Năm 2016, chính phủ Việt Nam đã công bố chiến lược phát triển lực lượng lao động lành nghề để đáp ứng nhu cầu trong nước và quốc tế và đưa đất nước ngang tầm với phần còn lại của khu vực ASEAN, mặc dù có rất ít chi tiết được công bố kể từ đó.
(Reuters) – Một mặt trận mới mở ra trong cuộc chiến thương mại Mỹ-Trung khi các công ty chuyển sản xuất sang Việt Nam tham gia vào một cuộc chiến khốc liệt thu hút lao động lành nghề, làm trầm trọng thêm tình trạng thiếu hụt lao động lành nghề và thúc đẩy cải cách giáo dục để giải quyết vấn đề này.
Sinh viên thực tập tại phòng thí nghiệm của một trường cao đẳng dạy nghề công nghiệp tại Hà Nội, Việt Nam ngày 9 tháng 10 năm 2019. Ảnh chụp ngày 9 tháng 10 năm 2019 bởi REUTERS / Kham
Việt Nam trở thành một trong những nước hưởng lợi lớn nhất từ cuộc chiến thương mại giữa Washington và Bắc Kinh.
Xuất khẩu sang Hoa Kỳ đã tăng 21,5% trong 8 tháng đầu năm 2019 và một số công ty bao gồm cả công ty mẹ của Google là Alphabet Inc ( GOOGL.O ) và Nintendo ( 7974.T ) đã công bố kế hoạch mới để mở các cơ sở tại nước này. Tiếp tục đọc “Điểm nghẽn: Lao động lành nghề Việt Nam thiếu hụt nặng từ chiến tranh thương mại Trung-Mỹ”
Human activity has made an ocean circulation pattern misbehave—triggering a weird confluence of events that has caused the infestations.
Desert locusts have swarmed into Kenya by the hundreds of millions from Somalia and Ethiopia, where such numbers haven’t been seen in a quarter-century. The insects are decimating farmland, threatening an already vulnerable region.
East Africa is in the midst of a crisis that sounds like something out of the Book of Exodus: A plague of locusts is spreading across the region, threatening the food supply of tens of millions. City-sized swarms of the dreaded pests are wreaking havoc as they descend on crops and pasturelands, devouring everything in a matter of hours. The scale of the locust outbreak, which now affects seven East African countries, is like nothing in recent memory. Tiếp tục đọc “A plague of locusts has descended on East Africa. Climate change may be to blame.”
January 31 2020, 5:24 PM February 01 2020, 12:30 PM (Bloomberg) —
Liontrust Asset Management Plc is using its leverage as a shareholder to demand that companies set more ambitious targets for reducing their impact on the climate. The London-based firm, which has more than 5 billion pounds ($6.6 billion) in its sustainable investment funds, is telling the companies in those portfolios to adopt emissions targets in line with the Paris Agreement’s goals on limiting rising temperatures.
And it’s telling firms in fields from education to health care to work with organizations like the Science Based Targets initiative to lend rigor to their plans. Liontrust will use its weight in shareholder votes and the threat of divestment to persuade companies to reduce their carbon emissions to zero, according to a spokeswoman. “We are encouraging them to be bold and raise ambition, because we think that will ultimately make them more successful businesses in a low-carbon economy,” said Mike Appleby, an investment manager at Liontrust. Tiếp tục đọc “Adopt Science-Based Climate Targets Or We’ll Divest, Says $6 Billion Fund”
Even if China releases water from its hydropower dams on the Mekong River, it might not reach the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, experts warn.
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A farmer in Long Phu District in the Mekong Delta province of Soc Trang holds rice plants that have all died because of drought, January 22, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Huy Phong. |
Releasing water is a task China has to do periodically as its dams cannot keep holding back water, and given the increasing level of ice melt that raises sea level, it is a must for China to save its land from salt intrusion, Le Anh Tuan, deputy head of the Climate Change Institute at Can Tho University, said.
Tiếp tục đọc “Experts say water release from Chinese dams too little to reach Vietnam”
(VTC News) – Hạn hán, xâm nhập mặn khiến cây lúa không phát triển được, chị Thoa (Giồng Trôm, Bến Tre) đành cắt lúa đem về cho bò ăn dần.
Các địa phương ở Đồng bằng sông Cửu Long (ĐBSCL) đang trải qua đợt hạn hán, xâm nhập mặn được đánh giá là khốc liệt nhất từ trước đến nay.
Tại Bến Tre, ảnh hưởng của hạn, mặn khiến lúa sinh trưởng chậm, diện tích bị ảnh hưởng khoảng 4.856 ha. Theo UBND tỉnh, vụ lúa đông xuân 2019 – 2020, bà con xuống giống khoảng 5.280 ha, tập trung ở các huyện Ba Tri, Giồng Trôm và Bình Đại. Tiếp tục đọc “Hạn, mặn khốc liệt ở miền Tây: Dân cắt lúa hỏng cho bò ăn dần”
#Climatebreakthroughweek
Nguồn: https://www.climatebreakthroughproject.org/awardee/nguy-thi-khanh/
Chúng tôi vinh dự được chia sẻ thông tin, Climate Breakthrough Project vừa công bố hai giải thưởng mới của năm 2019: Bà Ngụy Thị Khanh của Việt Nam và Ông Arief Rabik của Indonesia. Cả hai sẽ nhận được 2 triệu đô la trong ba năm tới để thiết kế và đưa ra các sáng kiến toàn cầu.
By Dana Nuccitelli, February 3, 2020
Long-exposure photo of the first atomic bomb test, code-named Trinity, and taken at 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945.
The heat absorbed in Earth’s oceans reached a new record in 2019, found a recent study published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. Despite the fact that this has been the case for almost every year over the past decade, this information dominated the news cycle, with some particularly viral headlines noting that the amount of energy accumulating in the oceans is equivalent to detonating five Hiroshima atomic bombs per second, every second over the past 25 years.
Tiếp tục đọc “Earth is heating at a rate equivalent to five atomic bombs per second. Or two Hurricane Sandys.”
BVR&MT – Tbong ngồi trong bóng râm của căn chòi tạm bợ trên bờ hồ Tonlé Sap, quanh anh là mấy đứa trẻ tò mò.
“Cá quả, cá trê, cá tai tượng… Trước đây, cách đây rất lâu, hồ có rất nhiều cá”, anh vừa nói vừa nheo mắt vì nắng.
Nhưng mọi thứ thay đổi chóng vánh. Các loài cá suy giảm, thực vật đang chết dần và toàn bộ hệ thống sông Mê Công tan rã. Đối với những đứa trẻ tụ tập quanh Tbong, một Tonlé Sap trù phú chỉ còn trong chuyện kể.
Nằm ở trung tâm lưu vực hạ nguồn sông Mê Công, Tonlé Sap là hồ nước ngọt lớn nhất Đông Nam Á. Hồ và vùng ngập lũ xung quanh được UNESCO công nhận là khu dự trữ sinh quyển vào năm 1997, là nơi sinh sản, cung cấp nguồn thức ăn và là nơi thu hoạch hàng trăm loài cá và các sản phẩm thủy sản khác. Tiếp tục đọc “Mê Kông cạn cá”
Given the growing international pressure to mitigate climate change and increasing fears around climate impacts, expectations of continued investment in fossil fuels in Southeast Asia’s power sector appear puzzling. This paper explores how power sector investors perceive climate-related risks and how they factor these risks into investment decision-making.
Tiếp tục đọc “Perceptions of climate related investment risk in Southeast Asia’s power sector”
New data shows how fossil fuel companies have driven climate crisis despite industry knowing dangers
by Matthew Taylor and Jonathan Watts
The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.
New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the industry’s devastating impact on the planet.
The analysis, by Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, the world’s leading authority on big oil’s role in the escalating climate emergency, evaluates what the global corporations have extracted from the ground, and the subsequent emissions these fossil fuels are responsible for since 1965 – the point at which experts say the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known by both industry leaders and politicians. Tiếp tục đọc “Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions”
Aftermath of January 2020 wildfires in Rosedale, Victoria, about 184 kilometers east of Melbourne, Australia. Image courtesy Alan Meredith
“We are unleashing hell on Australia.”
Those were the words that David Karoly of the University of Melbourne used to portray the wildfires ravaging the lands down-under more than a decade ago. Yes, you read that right: this professor of climate change and climate variability had described an Australia of increased heat, drought, and catastrophic fire way back in 2009—not long after a round of wildfires had previously ravaged the landscape.
It turns out that while Australia’s 2019-20 summer wildfires may well be harbingers of death on a hotter planet for at least the rest of this century, they did not come without advance warning. The question now is: What are we going to do about it?
But first, let’s go back to those warnings, and how we got to this position.
Karoly’s research had, in part, focused on what is known here as Black Saturday—February 7, 2009—when devastating fires killed 173 people. (And another 374 extreme-heat-related deaths were attributed to the record-breaking heatwave across southern Australia that had set the stage for the flames.) Firefighters faced unprecedented conditions: high winds, very low humidity, a land dried by 10 years of drought, and a fire index reaching 170 on a 0-to-100 scale. The temperature hit a record 115.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the city of Melbourne and 119.8 degrees Fahrenheit in Victoria as a whole—the Australian state in which Melbourne sits. The amount of energy released by the fires was estimated to be the equivalent of around 1,500 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
Tiếp tục đọc “On a hotter planet, we are all Australians”
Water levels have fluctuated sharply with testing, but some are encouraged that China gave warning of its plan.
![People along the Mekong are struggling with sharply fluctuation water levels as China tests dam equipment. This Thai woman said her garden on the river bank was damaged by flash floods as water was released from the upstream dam [International Rivers via Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/1/12/eddfd6d2107149b2bb16d84b2343fdce_18.jpg "Mekong communities struggle as China tests dam equipment")
Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Water levels on the Mekong River, which flows through China and five other countries before emptying into the South China Sea, have dropped once again after Beijing revealed it was testing equipment at one of its 11 dams in the upper reaches of the vital waterway.
Tiếp tục đọc “Mekong communities struggle as China tests dam equipment”
07/01/2020 14:06 GMT+7
Saltwater intrusion in the Mekong Delta during the dry season, is forecast to enter local rivers 30-40km deeper than the annual average.
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| Salinity intrusion destroyed rice fields in the Mekong Delta province of Kien Giang in 2016.—VNA/VNS Photo Trong Dat |
That is more severe than 2016, the year of historic salinity which caused VND15 trillion (US$ 646 million) damage to the delta.
The concentration of salinity was about four grammes per litre, said minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyen Xuan Cuong at a meeting held on Friday in the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre. Tiếp tục đọc “Saltwater intrusion to enter deeper in Mekong Delta”
The loss of sand has caused erosion and increased salinity as well as subsidence in the Mekong Delta.
The studies of the Mekong River by Prof Stephen Darby from Southampton University found that within several years, the river bed fell by several meters on a section of hundreds of kilometers in length.
Tiếp tục đọc “Sand overexploitation of Mekong River raises worries for Mekong Delta”
CVD 