Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 240

Protection Centre (EPC/VITTEP) for central Vietnam, and CEFINEA
(HoChiMinh City University of Technology) for southern Vietnam.
Environmental quality monitoring of water and air takes place reg-
ularly, focusing on a limited number of parameters. 2 The National
Environmental Protection Agency NEPA, within the Ministry of Nat-
ural Resources and Environment MONRE, collects these environmen-
tal quality data and reports on them, among others via the recently
started annual State of the Environment Reports. 3 There is no national
monitoring programme on emissions of point sources such as major
industries or power plants, nor on diffuse sources such as agriculture or
motorised traffic. In addition to this national monitoring system a few
large cities (especially HoChiMinh City and HaNoi) have municipal
air and water quality monitoring systems, financed via local funding.
We will focus on HoChiMinh City as an example, being aware that
this is arguably the best practice in local environmental monitoring in
Vietnam.
HoChiMinh City has eight surface water quality monitoring sites
and nine air quality monitoring sites spread around town. The latter
are set up in 2002 with Official Development Assistance from Norway
and Denmark. The local environmental monitoring system in HaNoi
is less well developed and meets several technological, organisational
and managerial constraints in implementation (Pham Minh Hai, 2005 ).
Reports on processed monitoring data are published with some delay
and most of them are only available on request from the monitoring

2

Environmental monitoring for NEPA by these institutions includes surface
water quality, air quality and solid waste. For each of the three regions, there
are ten surface water monitoring locations (some twenty parameters are
included), six locations for monitoring air quality, and one for solid waste.
NEPA budgets for environmental monitoring have increased sharply in the past
few years, especially because of the introduction of automatic monitoring
systems, and not so much following expansion of the number of monitoring
sites. There are a number of other ministries that have monitoring on
environmental issues (such as those on biodiversity, on pesticides, energy), but
there is little data exchange and coordination between the ministries responsible
for the various monitoring programs (Pham Minh Hai, 2005 ).

3

A four-hundred-page long SOER is annually published for use within NEPA, a
shorter ninety-page version is sent to the National Assembly, and a summary is
sent to other line ministries (Faucher, 2006 ). In 2005, for the first time, a
concise version of the State of the Environment report was made publicly
available, which is part of new legal requirements as of 1 July 2006.