Vietnam Leads World in "Delivering the Good Life in a Sustainable Way"

On Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 12:36 PM, Charles Waugh <charles.waugh@usu.edu> wrote:

Interesting article on the NPR website.

"Only one country comes even close to delivering the good life in a sustainable way: Vietnam succeeds on six social indicators — including a life expectancy above 65 years and providing sufficient nutrition — while staying within its limit on every environmental threshold except carbon emissions.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/02/07/583475222/if-we-bring-the-good-life-to-all-will-we-destroy-the-planet

On Feb 10, 2018 1:09 AM, "Deo Huu" <deochienhuu@gmail.com> wrote:

Clearly the authors of that study were not considering human rights as part of "the good life". The continuing sentencing of bloggers for mentioning things that the government does not want discussed, like pollution, etc, and the ratings of various international bodies of Viet Nam as very low in freedoms, keeps it clear that this is essentially a totalitarian government. But I suppose we could go back to "Mussolini made the trains run on time". And I have to wonder about the rating of income inequality when the 1% of 1% in Viet Nam have kids in California colleges whose pastime is collecting super expensive cars, while the average VN family has a struggle to buy a $2K motorbike. I also wonder where Singapore ended up in their ratings, where the government provides a wide range of benefits to the citizens.

R J Del Vecchio

Independent Researcher

On Feb 10, 2018, at 6:00 AM, Ben Quick <bnquick74@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the link Charles. While Vietnam certainly has its problems, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Ben

On 11 February 2018 at 03:30, Thi Bay Miradoli <thibay.miradoli@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Ben

What country doesn’t? :) :)

Dear R J Del Vecchio,

The report seeks to identify and illustrate the impact of factors that improve our individual and collective lives, not which country’s human rights violation are worst. There are indexes for that (AI, HRW, HRF, UNHCHR, etc). I m so sorry that you are so tormented by your resentment towards Vietnam. May I suggest Twitter? It s a great platform to voice our anger, find likeminded individuals and build common causes. It has helped me a lot when frustrated with, angry at, the country I live in and the government that governs me. It has also taught me that “resentment is like drinking a little bit of poison everyday but expect our enemy to die” (NOT my quote. Author unknown)

Thi Bay Miradoli

Unaffiliated

Sadly not currently in Vietnam

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 10, 2018, at 9:31 PM, Andrew Wells-Dang <andrewwd@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks to Charles Waugh for the link to the Nature article. The method the authors used is based on the "doughnut" theory of my Oxfam former colleague, Kate Raworth: that a good life consists of having enough social benefits without crossing environmental limits. The article's findings on Vietnam are that it meets 6 of 11 social indicators (which sounds about right to me) and 5 of 6 environmental indicators (which seems doubtful). If you read the fine print at the end of the article, the findings are taken from a set of global databases in 2011 - and as with any such research, the results are only as valid as the underlying data. It's likely that Vietnam's environment has deteriorated in some ways since 2011, and no way to know how good the original data is anyway (of course, this is the case for many countries, not only Vietnam). Conclusion is that the article is interesting and worth reading for its global implications, but the findings on Vietnam should be taken with some grains of salt - or maybe dipped in a big bowl of nước mắm, if you prefer!

Andrew Wells-Dang

(Governance adviser, Oxfam in Vietnam)

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:11 AM, Rob Hurle <rob1940@gmail.com> wrote:

Thi Bay, thank you for expressing my own feelings on this topic so well.

Rob Hurle

-----------------------------

Rob Hurle

e-mail: rob1940@gmail.com

Mobile: +61 417 293 603 (Australia)

Telephone: (02) 6236 3895

28 Mirrormere Rd, Burra, NSW 2620, Australia

From: Vsg [mailto:vsg-bounces@mailman11.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Greg Nagle

Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2018 11:12 PM

To: Jonathan Sutton <jonathan.i.sutton@gmail.com>

Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Vietnam leads world in "delivering the good life in a sustainable way"

Vietnam is seen as a very clear outlier in the upper left quadrant of the figure,

Interestingly, its social thresholds are on a par with Thailand, Costa Rica and Greece with alleged Viet biophysical impacts less than 25% of Thailand's. This is very curious since the Thais also depend so much on intensive rice cultivation but probably with much more fertilizer.. Land use also seems stable in Thailand with an increase in forest cover in recent years.

Without accessing the data tables to see the scores each country got on the biophysical impacts, it is hard to judge this analysis and compare countries..

But rice cultivation in Vietnam is pretty stable with minimal loss of phosphorus (?) from the paddies while loss of nitrogen is probably much more serious.

Land use seems relatively stable, hence a low score for ecological footprint (?)

I do not see any measure to compare pollution levels but those are hard to get since water pollution levels can change a lot over the season and year/.

Air quality has certainly gone down in Hanoi since 2011.

But interestingly the Hanoi government has been very aggressive in now dealing with pollution problems in some Hanoi lakes, Hoan Kiem is having phosphorus and toxin laden sediment removed from the bottom-about 27,000 cubic meters-or 2700 large dump truck loads, Many other lakes now have an array of fountains to take up oxygen deficient water from the bottom and throw it into the air. Low oxygen ( anoxic) levels can result in release of phosphorus from the sediment and algae blooms with shoals of dead fish.

I do not know who does it for them, but they are getting good advice on this,

I do what I can and led the crowd of kids into the bottom to clean out the sewage laden "stream" below the Long Bien Bridge>

Fell into the thing too----awful but it got us all on Hanoi TV.

Greg Nagle

(PhD in forest and watershed science)

Hanoi

Center for Environment and Community Assets Development

http://cecad.vn/en

On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 10:26 AM, Charles Waugh <charles.waugh@usu.edu> wrote:

And thanks to Greg Nagle for posting the link to the actual article.

What I found most interesting was the placing of the issue of sustainability above all the others, trying to demonstrate that people can have a "good life" and still live within certain environmental limits. I agree that the study can only be as good as the data—and that what might be most interesting of all would be the same study done with new data as it becomes available over time to see how these various indicators change in relation to one another. But the idea behind the whole endeavor—perhaps to shift conversations about development more toward sustainability; maybe even to shift what it means to be developed more toward what it means to be sustainable—seems like a good thing to me. That would put a lot of countries back into the “developing” category, including the U.S. And generally speaking, if any of us humans are going to survive the next couple hundred years, we’re going to need to set aside some of our old binaries (like developed or developing) and think about our global problems in better ways.

At any rate, I’d hoped the article might spark some discussion, especially from those in VSG who do development work (like yourself, Andrew!), who might have more up to date info than what the study used. I also wonder to what extent sustainability enters into your daily conversations, goals, policies, or work, if at all.

And sorry, everyone for posting the initial link without identifying myself. Tired human error.

Charles

Charles Waugh

Utah State University

On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 11:36 AM, Jonathan Sutton <jonathan.i.sutton@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear all,

Greg is making a good point here, and I think that there is a definite link between the original posted article and human rights in Vietnam. If you look in the footnotes of the Nature article, you can see that it's based on data from the Eora MRIO and World Bank databases, which are both drawn primarily from national statistics bureaus.

I think the human rights situation is relevant here because on top of the Vietnamese government's general disinclination towards openness and transparency, its intense persecution of dissidents who try to highlight environmental problems proves (as everyone here already knows) that the environment is an extremely sensitive topic. This means that the article is drawing conclusions about Vietnam's development and sustainability using data which comes from the government's own assessment of its environmental performance, when its track record on repressing dissent shows that it is not willing to tolerate the dissemination of information about environmental problems. So it seems pretty clear that we need to interpret the findings of the article in regards to Vietnam with at least a healthy degree of skepticism. This is reinforced, for me anyway, by Vietnam's position as a quite notable outlier compared to the rest of the world (shown in figure 2, p. 90 in the article) - is Vietnam really doing that much better than every other country in the world, or are there other potential explanations?

Whether such skepticism is warranted is another question - the environmental issues the study is looking at (fertiliser use and so on) don't seem that big a deal politically, but then I'm not as familiar with the 'red line', being out of the country. At least, though, it's worth discussing.

Cheers

--

Jonathan Sutton

National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies

University of Otago, New Zealand

Twitter: @jonathanisutton

On 12 February 2018 at 15:10, Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com> wrote:

I do not have much faith at all in the 2011 data, especially any water quality data since it is scarce in Vietnam or held very closely by the government>

In recent years there have been massive fish kills in rivers and the ocean due to a variety of causes and those new industries seem to have pretty minimal controls on discharges.

These are difficult to manage but Deo made the good point about the importance of public pressure and open debate which impelled changes in N America and Europe,

This is of course confounded by any corruption that allows companies to get away with too much ( Louisiana??) , The Formosa disaster several years ago is a case in point with recent dire convictions of citizen activists who tried to rally the public, One just got a 14 year sentence.

Greg Nagle

(PhD in forest science and watersheds)

Hanoi Center for Environment and Community Assets Development

http://cecad.vn/en

On Feb 13, 2018, at 3:02 PM, Pamela McElwee <pdmcelwee@gmail.com> wrote:

Since this is a subject on which I do a fair bit of research, let me weigh in on this Nature Sustainability article. As with any global dataset purporting to compare and contrast among nations, the indicators you choose influence the results you get. This paper uses 11 social indicators and 7 biophysical indicators, and this maps out how many social indicators a country achieves and how many biophysical indicators exceed the global per capita average estimated to avoid crossing a boundary of excess (e.g. carbon emissions per capita that would be needed to keep the world under 2 degrees, etc). The more social indicators you meet without exceeding biophysical boundaries, the more ‘sustainable’ the country is.

In the case of Vietnam, the country meets 6 out of 11 social indicators (life expectancy, nutrition (Kcal per day), income (% of population above World Bank poverty line of $1.90 a day, energy (% of pop with access to electricity), education, and employment), while it does not achieve ‘social sustainability’ in 5 indicators: life satisfaction, sanitation, social support, equality and finally, and importantly, Vietnam scores VERY low on the 'democratic quality’ indicator (a combination of voice, accountability and political stability - pulled from the report Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and Analytical Issues). Importantly, this article simply aggregates indicators (you achieve it or you don’t), and doesn't weight indicators, so if you really miss the mark on one versus you just miss it, either way it comes out the same. In other words, you aren’t dinged for really being bad on one indicator, which can give a misleading picture. It also assumes that all indicators are the same: e.g. not having democracy is of equal importance to a population as not having full employment. That seems debatable.

It is in the biophysical indicators where there are specific problems with the data. Vietnam is listed as only exceeding 1 of 7 biophysical indicators (carbon emissions), while being under the per capita boundary on phosphorus, nitrogen, water use, land use change, ecological footprint and material footprints. I won’t bore anyone with the arcane details of how each are assessed but several problems stand out: the nitrogen and phosphorus data they use for Vietnam is quite old (1990s) and doesn’t reflect the huge growth in fertilizer use since then (certainly exceeding per capita boundaries at this point - for example, Vietnam uses 3x the fertilizer per ha of land that the US does, and the US is not exactly a model of efficiency in this field). Secondly, the water consumption data is an average of 1996-2005 nationally reported data - which Vietnam underreports as they don’t monitor every river basin very well and water consumption has increased dramatically since then. Finally, the report's indicator for land-use change is not a measure of actual land use change (e.g. % of forests converted to agriculture) but assesses human use of overall net primary production, so doesn’t capture the massive changes in forest cover that have occurred in Vietnam over the last century. I expect several researchers will write into Nature Sustainability on this last point in particular as it’s a very odd way to measure land use change.

So with different/better data, it’s likely Vietnam actually transgresses at least 4-5 biophysical boundaries, while achieving 6 social indicators, which would put it on par with Thailand, Italy and Bulgaria.

Best,

Pam McElwee

Dr. Pamela McElwee

Associate Professor, Department of Human Ecology

School of Environmental and Biological Sciences

Affiliated graduate faculty: Department of Anthropology, Department of Geography, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

pm473@sebs.rutgers.edu

Office phone: 848-932-9209

Mobile phone: 480-252-0999

CHECK OUT MY NEW BOOK: Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam, 2016, University of Washington Press. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/MCEFOR.html

Lead author, Chapter 6, Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): ipbes.net

Lead author, Chapter 6, Climate Change and Land: an IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.

IUCN CEM Cultural Practices and Ecosystem Management Thematic Group Lead https://www.iucn.org/commissions/commission-ecosystem-management/our-work/cems-thematic-groups/cultural-practices-and-ecosystem-management

From: Vsg [mailto:vsg-bounces@mailman11.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Charles Waugh

Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2018 2:34 PM

To: Pamela McElwee <pdmcelwee@gmail.com>

Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Vietnam leads world in "delivering the good life in a sustainable way"

Dear Pam,

Thanks for this great, detailed analysis! Certainly a different picture than what the article suggested!

Assuming that Vietnam isn’t the only country they’ve got old or suspect data for, it doesn’t look like the articles’ authors have got much to say that actually reflects reality. It sure would be good to see the whole project updated with accurate info. But even then, sounds like you’re not a fan of the method anyway, since the indicators are aggregated and not weighted. I wonder what a real “good life” versus sustainability analysis would look like?

At any rate, thanks again for your time sifting through this!

Charles

Charles Waugh

Utah State University