Typhoon Yagi highlights Vietnam’s climate change reality

Michael Tatarski

Early September, Typhoon Yagi cut a destructive path across northern Vietnam. The storm shredded buildings in coastal areas such as Hai Phong and Ha Long City with winds of up to 149 kilometres per hour, felled tens of thousands of trees in Hanoi, and caused devastating landslides in mountainous areas.

Vietnam’s death toll stands at around 300, with many people still missing, while the total damage could add up to US$2.5 billion. Whatever the final figures, Yagi is already the worst storm in modern Vietnamese history. It left more people dead and missing than all the natural disasters of 2023, which caused 131 deaths and left 38 people missing.

The impact was particularly felt by disadvantaged communities living along the Red River in Hanoi, outside the capital’s flood protection dyke. These areas were severely flooded when heavy upstream rain pushed the river to levels not seen in half a century.

This communities “are already very disadvantaged and living in poverty and struggling with many things in life like legal paperwork, keeping their kids in school, having a safe and secure home,” said Skye Maconachie, co-chief executive of local non-governmental organization Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. “So they were hugely impacted and really wanted to preserve everything they had, but obviously they have now lost everything,” she said in an interview on The Vietnam Weekly Podcast.

While Yagi’s path was predicted days in advance, giving officials and residents time to prepare, the typhoon was far stronger than usual, even for a country used to tropical storms.

On average, around a dozen tropical storms impact Vietnam annually. Many only affect the country’s islands in the South China Sea, known locally as the East Sea. The typhoon season runs from June to November, while storms that make landfall usually do so in central or north-central provinces.

It is exceptionally rare for Hanoi to take a direct hit from a typhoon, especially one as powerful as Yagi, which slammed into China’s Hainan Island as a super typhoon and maintained dangerous strength before reaching Vietnam.

Le Thi Xuan Lan, a former deputy head of forecasting at the Southern Region Hydro-Meteorological Center, told the Vietnamese news outlet VnExpress that climate change was the primary driver of Yagi’s record strength.

Climate change, she explained, is causing the periodical weather pattern known as La Niña to show “anomalous characteristics,” according to the article. This has been associated with increasing sea temperatures which in turn drives more powerful storms, as has also been seen during the Atlantic Ocean’s annual hurricane season.

"The appearance of a storm at this time is not unusual, but the strength of the storm is,” said Phan Van Tan, an expert in hydrometeorology and climate change at the University of Science under Vietnam National University in Hanoi. “Climate change is disrupting many natural laws," he told the newspaper.

In the future, such storms are expected to become more frequent and even more intense, with Vietnam assessed as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change impacts.

For people in the path of such storms, the impact goes well beyond the immediate damage.

“Many of them don't want to go back to where they were,” said Maconachie. “There's a psychological and emotional period where people need to kind of process all that's lost,” she added. “They need to feel safe before they can even get their head around how they rebuild or how they clean up.”

Yagi also exposed problems with urban planning and rural forest management in Vietnam, though these issues are hardly unique to the country.

In Hanoi, for example, residents noticed that the roots of many downed trees were still wrapped in the plastic they were planted with, inhibiting root growth and making them more susceptible to strong winds.

Other commentators noticed that tree roots simply don’t have anywhere to go given Hanoi’s rapid, often haphazard urban development.

Many of Vietnam’s natural forests, meanwhile, have been cleared in recent decades and replaced with rubber and acacia plantations. These trees are harvested every few years and don’t hold the soil on mountainsides together like older forests.

Ultimately, Maconachie highlighted the long-term needs of the communities hardest hit by Yagi, needs that will stretch well beyond the immediate aid coming from domestic and international sources.

“Long-term, people need houses - they need a safe and secure place to live,” she said. “If they don't have that, it's very hard to overcome any psychological or economic impact. So that means a lot of rebuilding, renovating, or relocating in the worst-case scenario. And then earning an income: if they can earn, there's purpose.”

The psychological impact mentioned by Maconachie is another key long-term issue. The World Health Organization lists several emergency responses that can be effective for mental health, including community self-help and social support, psychological first aid, basic clinical mental health care, and psychological interventions.

It remains to be seen how mental health post-Yagi will be addressed, but this subject in general is still in the early stages of understanding in Vietnam.

Damaged communities, meanwhile, will need to be rebuilt with increased resilience, given the high likelihood of similarly powerful storms in the future. The immediate response to Yagi has been heartening, but much work remains in the long term.

The views in this article are not necessarily those of FES.