Hanoi is currently the leading locality in Vietnam in establishing a modern and uniform environmental quality monitoring system.

The municipal authority also publicly releases environmental monitoring data on the website https://moitruongthudo.vn.

Mai Trong Thai, head of the city’s Environment Protection Division under the Environment Department, said that his division has advised the municipal People's Committee to enhance the planning work on environmental protection, especially environment monitoring, to make it uniform with other specialized plans in the city's socio-economic development master plan.

An automatic air quality monitoring station in Hanoi. Photo: Kinhtedothi.vn

Mr. Thai said his division has been operating 35 automatic air monitoring stations, six surface water monitoring stations, a waste water monitoring station at Nam Son waste treatment complex in Soc Son district, and one mobile air monitoring truck.

"We have invested in rolling out 15 fixed air environmental monitoring stations, three radioactive monitoring equipment, five water monitoring stations, and six underground water monitoring stations," Mr. Thai said.

We have set the target to complete the environmental monitoring network in the city by 2021," he added.

In the time ahead, the Hanoi Department of Natural Resources and Environment will keep applying the software for modeling pollution data transmission and forecast, identifying pollution causes, developing short-term/medium-term/long-term action plans for environmental protection, and proactively responding to environmental incidents and climate change.

Earlier, the city has implemented an array of environmental protection solutions, checked development plans which include climate change adaptation factors, prioritized eco-friendly projects and focused on implementing sustainable environmental protection solutions towards a building a low carbon city.

Hanoi has so far installed 50 indoor sensor stations at schools and some offices to provide people with timely air quality indicators. This helps policy-makers come up with appropriate regulations in improving air quality.