Speaker: Ms. Caitlin Wiesen, UNDP Resident Representative in Viet Nam
Date: 02.00PM (Friday, 26/6)     
Event: Climate Business Index Launching Event

- Excellency Vice-Minister Vu Dai Thang – Ministry of Planning and Investment,
- Distinguished representatives of government agencies, enterprises, development partners and media agencies,
- Distinguished guests,
- Ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, I am delighted to welcome you all to this Launching event of the Climate Business Index - a joint and innovative initiative between the Ministry of Planning and Investment and UNDP. This initiative is developed under the UNDP’s global Support Programme for Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

Allow me to take this opportunity to congratulate Viet Nam for its impressive containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Viet Nam’s success story has been recognized globally as one of the best examples of joint efforts by Government, businesses and communities to address such a significant challenge.

Viet Nam already demonstrated many good successful examples over the past decades, including miracle reform in late 80’s, and poverty reduction; and has been making good progresses in setting and achieving SDGs, Green Growth and Climate Change targets.

However, in order to leap to the next stage of economic development and effectively address environmental challenges, we will need full engagement, investment capital and innovation from the private sector, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

More than 700,000 (714,755) businesses and enterprises in Viet Nam contribute approximately 40 per cent of the GDP and create approximately 70 per cent of decent jobs. Many of them are already greening out their investments, generating decent jobs, aiming to participate in and benefit from global green value chains, which helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Following COVID-19, there are new opportunities emerging for Viet Nam to attract investments to re-gear up Viet Nam's economy, especially for SMEs. We should take this opportunity to pursue triple wins options, i) green recovery of the economy, fueled by the stimulus package provided by the government; ii) transformation toward green products to meet increasing demandsand requirements of green production processes and products, iii) while contribution to the protection of the planet and eliminate   global scale imposed weather extreme event and pandemics.

In this connection, the launch of the CBI today is very timely and important.  The overall objective of the CBI is to provide a platform for Governments, businesses and enterprises to work together This includes voluntary announcements on contributions from companies towards climate change, identifying investment needs and potential funding opportunities. CBI can also be used to address the needs in capacity building to support transformation into sustainable green business. You will be presented with more details in few minutes.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Governments of Germany and Spain and the European Union for their generous financial support to the UNDP NDC support. We also would like to thank the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) for their important support in promoting the CBI to enterprises.

Moving forward, we look forward to continuing our collaboration with the Government, enterprises, development partners, non-government organizations, start-up communities and other interested parties to recover from COVD-19 and transform into green development for the achievements of SDG in Viet Nam.

Xin cam on va chuc suc khoe.