Supporting MRV systems for Vietnam’s rice sector

Vietnam_MRV_Agriculture. Photo: Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pixabay

Workstream:

Enhancing NDC ambitions with mitigation in the agriculture sector

Ongoing

started:

2020

Vietnam harvests approximately 7.4 million hectares of rice a year. Methane emissions from rice production account for 50% of emissions from agriculture, which in turn contributes 33% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Complying with the Paris Agreement, Vietnam has agreed to cut 8% to 25% of total greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by 2030. As a part of the action plan to implement the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Vietnam’s government included alternate wetting and drying as one of the agriculture mitigations measures in their National Development Agenda of the 14th National Assembly of Vietnam.

Vietnam is working with CCAC partners and local experts to achieve large-scale mitigation of methane emissions from paddy rice cultivation at a national scale, by supporting the private sector with decision support tools and leveraging investments.

Objectives

This project will help Vietnam reach its NDC target by achieving large-scale mitigation of SLCP emissions from paddy rice cultivation through leveraged investment. This will be achieved by supporting the private sector with decision support tools for optimizing low carbon value chains to be integrated into sustainable corporate strategies, and by developing a normative MRV framework to provide generic guidelines and protocols for field measurement of emission factors and compilation of activity data to support country MRV for rice-sector NAMA projects.

What we're doing

Since 2020, this project has helped Vietnam:

Prepare a private sector toolkit comprising of guidelines on technical implementation for private sector rice value chain actors, software for computing mitigation potentials developed in coordination with other CCAC related tools, and guidelines for optimizing co-benefits between short-lived climate pollutant (SLCP) mitigation and adaptation. These templates and tools are aligned with the Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) Standard and Performance Indicators.
Develop a normative monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) framework to provide generic guidelines and protocols for field measurement of emission factors and compilation of activity data to support rice-sector NAMA projects.
Prepare country-specific scoping studies on SLCP mitigation to assess the feasibility of SLCP mitigation activities within the national context.

Why we're doing this work

The agriculture sector in Vietnam contributes to a significant proportion of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions with rice production responsible for 18% of total national emissions. The current mitigation measures for agriculture listed in Vietnam's technical Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) reports are heavily dependent upon mitigation from the rice sector with a quarter of the measures directly relating to rice: biogas, agricultural residues, alternate wetting and drying (AWD), biochar, integrated management of rice, integrated management of crops, the substitution of urea fertilizer, cattle diets, improve aquaculture, improve waste in aquaculture, and others.

Although Vietnam has a strong supporting legal framework and enabling political environment, an MRV system has yet to be developed at the national level and for the different sectors. This could be explained by the fact that the capacity to implement MRV at the national level in general, and in the different agriculture sectors, especially in the measurement component, is weak. According to reports, there are insufficient facilities, equipment, and human resources to satisfy the requirements of MRV tasks, especially in ensuring transparency and compliance to the UNFCCC MRV Framework. Therefore, this project seeks to greatly help address these challenges and support the country achieve its emission reduction targets on time.