New resources only meet 30% of demand
The latest report of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Construction, to basically solve 159 flooding points due to rain and high tides by 2030, the city needs to implement 157 projects with a total investment of nearly 340,000 billion VND. However, existing resources only meet about 30% of the needs. This means that without additional resources, Ho Chi Minh City can hardly escape the situation of "half-hearted flood control".
Ho Chi Minh City is currently facing many challenges at the same time: Increased extreme rain due to climate change, high tides regularly exceeding 1.8m, while urban land subsidence continues at an average rate of about 2cm/year, in some places up to 5-8cm/year. The total subsidence after 10-12 years is commonly from 20-30cm, even in some areas exceeding 50cm.
These figures show that the design elevation of many culverts, pumping stations, and dykes is no longer suitable for reality, causing the effectiveness of flood control to decline rapidly. Meanwhile, the updating of drainage and flood control planning is slow, and many projects are still based on outdated rain, tide, and sea level rise parameters.
Notably, rapid urbanization has caused the area of natural water seepage to narrow, ponds and lakes to be filled, and canals and ditches to be cut off. The city not only lacks investment capital, but also lacks "space resources" to store water, an increasingly important factor in the context of heavy rains.
Solving the problem of capital shortage
In the 2026-2030 period, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee has only approved 51/157 flood control projects, with a total capital of about 158,000 billion VND. With this resource, the city is expected to only handle 72/159 flooding points. The rest will continue to be "suspended" due to lack of capital.
Reality shows that many flood control projects are prolonged for many years not because of lack of technical solutions, but because of lack of stable and long-term financial resources. Meanwhile, non-budgetary resources such as PPP, ODA, and socialization have not promoted their key roles. Investment attraction mechanisms are still inefficient, high risks, and long capital recovery times make businesses hesitant. Flood control is therefore still mainly based on the State budget - a resource that is increasingly limited.
The flood control problem of Ho Chi Minh City cannot be solved simply by building more culverts and pumping stations. Many experts believe that the city needs to supplement ecological resources: regulating lakes, water storage space, flood drainage corridors and sustainable drainage solutions.
Ho Chi Minh City is currently seriously lacking large-scale regulating lakes. Many new urban areas are developing rapidly, but the water storage infrastructure is not keeping up. When heavy rain occurs, water quickly pours into sewers, while the discharge gate is controlled by tides, leading to deep and prolonged flooding.
Prolonged groundwater exploitation also exacerbates subsidence. This is a "hidden cost" that the city is paying due to lack of surface water sources and lack of integrated water resource management solutions.
A major limitation is that flood control in Ho Chi Minh City has not been approached according to inter-regional basins. If resources are only concentrated within the city, lacking regional coordination, the risk of "spreading flooding from one place to another" is unavoidable. Therefore, Ho Chi Minh City needs more resources not only from local budgets but also from regional and national investment programs, with a unified coordination mechanism.
If capital, water storage space and inter-regional mechanism resources are not fully supplemented soon, Ho Chi Minh City will hardly escape the vicious cycle of "rain is flooding". Anti-flooding is therefore not just a technical issue, but a problem of mobilizing and allocating resources for the future of the city.
For sustainable development, Ho Chi Minh City needs to be supported by strong and long-term resources; because prolonged flooding not only causes economic losses, but also erodes the quality of life, competitiveness and people's trust.
