VietNamNet Bridge – The lack of investment and land shortages in different areas have stymied HCM City's plans to build and upgrade green parks, officials say.

While the development of green parks has been accorded high priority in the city's urban growth strategy, especially in the context of serious climate change impacts, implementation has proceeded at a tardy pace.

A report reviewing activities of the city's Department of Transportation and Communication last year showed that they were confined to maintaining and upgrading existing parks, making little or no headway in developing new ones.

The main reason for this is that there is no investment for projects to build new green parks, according to Nguyen Thi Hien Luong, who oversees the department's green parks development plans.

The investment for building new parks includes compensation paid for land clearance. An official with the HCM City Green Park Company said investors typically preferred projects that had to do with easing traffic jams and flooding.

Luong said another reason for the investment dearth was the backlog in planning that had affected the city's green park project for 15 years. The estimated costs and implementation schedule for the project had not been approved, said Luong.

"Without detailed plans and investment estimates, the project cannot appeal to investors," Luong said.

The lack of investment has, in turn, considerably slowed the land clearance process. The Sai Gon Safari Green Park Project in the city's suburban district of Cu Chi is an example. There are 27 houses, one school and hundreds of grave yards yet to move because no compensation has been paid.

Some other plans to build large-scale green parks of at least 6ha have been approved as part of the city's master plan but because there has not been any investment, the land reserved for these has been encroached upon, according to Luong.

Another reason for the slow progress is the shortage of land for building new green parks. Vacant land is hard to come by in the city's 13 urban districts and it is almost zero in the central districts of 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10.

Corruption is another contributing factor to the slow implementation of the city's green park development. In a number of projects on building a new urban area, contractors benefited from the land reserved for public use. They've built tennis courts, soccer fields or other amusement facilities on land reserved for green parks.

In suburban areas, despite the availability of vacant land, local authorities cannot carry out their plans because of the usual problem - no investment. As of last October, only 11 out of 19 suburban districts had reported to the city administration their plans to develop green parks.

Encroached green space

The maintenance and upgrade of parks have also faced challenges.

Most of the green parks in new urban areas are degraded and partially encroached upon for business purposes.

The department has said that it has not been able to fulfil the objective of planting new trees in the city because some of the places reserved for this have been used up by other constructions. The department has so far managed to plant only two-thirds of the 2,300 trees supposed to be planted.

The department has asked the local administrations to help address the problem but it has not received any positive feedback from them.

Since big cities and urban areas like HCM City are developing rapidly and having to deal with air and noise pollution, trees and parks become even more important parts of the solution, environmentalists have stressed.

Viet Nam is considered to be among the most vulnerable countries to climate change impacts including rising sea levels, and parks with big trees in them will play a crucially important mitigating role, experts say.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News