Scientific Conference “Green Growth, Sustainable Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Vietnam and the Business Community”

In the morning of November 8, 2017, the Center for Sustainable Development Studies under the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics organized a scientific conference titled “Green growth, sustainable development: Opportunities and Challenges for Vietnam and the business community”. The event was held in cooperation with the Economy and Forecast Review of the Ministry of Planning and Investment. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Quoc Ly, Vice President of the Academy cum the Center’s director and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Xuan Dinh, Editor-in-chief of the magazine co-chaired the conference.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Quoc Ly makes an opening speech in the conference

In his opening remarks, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Quoc Ly emphasized the inevitability and the importance of green growth and sustainable development for Vietnam, especially for the business community in the context of globalization and international integration today. He expressed his hope that while showing respect for the truth and having in-depth discussions, attendees of the conference, through opinion sharing, would contribute to recognizing and clarifying successes, limitations, opportunities and challenges for green growth and sustainable development. He expected that the sharing would help to bring solutions for Vietnam and its business community to develop sustainably with the motto of efficiency, productivity and quality in the current situation.

In his introduction presentation, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Xuan Dinh, Editor-in-chief of the Economy and Forecast Review, said that after more than 30 years of the implementation of a comprehensive reform in the country, Vietnam had gained many significant historical achievements. However, the economic development has relied mainly on broad-based growth factors, lacking sustainability, with many serious environmental and social issues arising. In this situational context, green growth had emerged as a new pattern of growth, ensuring goals of environmental protection and sustainable development. Nevertheless, green growth and sustainable development have also brought a lot of opportunities and challenges for all subjects in the socio-economic life, requiring a common understanding of it by the whole society.

With more than 20 presentations and various opinions given by  policy makers, managers, researchers, and the business community, the conference focused on the following contents: i) Implications of green growth, the relations between green growth and sustainable development; the role of the government and the business community in the process of developing green economic growth models, the responsibility of the business community for environmental protection; ii) Opportunities and challenges in the process of green growth and sustainable development; identifying green growth and sustainable development being a right and an obligation for actors involved in the process of economic development; iii) Domestic and international experience (Japan, Thailand, China, South Korea, and so on) in green growth and environmental protection; iv) Solutions to integrate green growth into the socio-economic development, the current governance policies, and the business strategies in corporate governance.

In Vietnam, the Prime Minister approved the National Green Growth Strategy in 2012 and the National Action Plan on Green Growth in 2014. According to the strategy and the plan, green growth is a growth model based on the process of changing growth models, restructuring the economy to fully exploit comparative advantages, increasing economic efficiency and competitiveness through research and application of advanced technologies, developing modern infrastructure system to use natural resources effectively, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, responding to climate change, contributing to hunger eradication and poverty reduction, and creating driving forces to promote sustainable economic growth.

In the current period, green growth is considered as an important part of sustainable development and an instrument to restructure the economy towards rapid and sustainable growth. This is a demand throughout the socio-economic development strategy in the 2012-2020 period. In order to implement the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) committed in the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Vietnam concretized 69 goals approved by the United Nations, which were subsequently institutionalized into 115 sustainable development goals of Vietnam in Decision No. 622/QD-TTg of the Prime Minister dated May 10, 2017. The implementation of green growth strategy through the green growth action plan is closely connected to the accomplishment of SDGs and NDC, with the former supporting the latter two 60% and 65% respectively.