The Biodiversity Finance Policy and Institutional Review (PIR) in Viet Nam (VN) has been conducted by independent consultant from May 2017 to February 2018. The PIR report focuses on analyzing the status and progress of the National Biodiversity Strategy (NBS) of Viet Nam, presented in 6 chapters including introduction and recommendations as well as references and annexes.

In recent decades, the status of biodiversity (BD) in Viet Nam is worsening against a high annual economic growth (6-8% on average), which has strong impact on dependency sectors like agriculture, fishery and forestry in which most people with low incomes earn their living. Recent studies on BD valuation show that investment in BD conservation is significantly less than its contribution to economic development in provinces and the country, in general. A supplementary study on the Biodiversity Expenditure Review provides more information in this regard.

To improve biodiversity conservation, in recent years the legal framework has been strengthened, including the National Constitution (2013), the Law on Biodiversity (2008), the Law on Environment Protection (2005), the Law on Forestry (2004, revised in 2017), the Law on Fishery (2003, revised in 2017), all supported by a variety of government policies and regulations providing guidance to the implementation of legislation on BD conservation. The VN NBS is the most important policy to accelerate BD conservation in VN.

In this executive summary, BIOFIN Mexico compiles the results of Phase I of the project, as well as the finance solutions for biodiversity that the initiative will be implementing during Phase II. 

Following the BIOFIN methodology, the Biodiversity Financial Needs Assessment (FNA) aims to make a comprehensive estimate of the financial resources required to achieve national biodiversity targets. This FNA builds on the findings of Thailand’s BER, which showed that the main domestic source of biodiversity funding in Thailand is from the government’s budget allocation, which mostly pays for the operations of the core environmental agencies. The total expenditure for the core agencies accounted for around 80 percent of the overall biodiversity related budget in 2015. The finance gap as the difference between the BAU budget allocation scenario and the required budget to execute the actions in the target areas amounts to $942 million (THB 31,978 million) for the remaining three-year period of the current NBSAP (2019-2021).