Vietnam

Vietnam emerged from the pandemic as one of the fastest-growing tourism economies on earth. In 2025 the country welcomed roughly 135.5 million domestic travelers and 21.2 million international arrivals, with tourism revenue clearing one quadrillion Vietnamese dong — about thirty-eight billion U.S. dollars — putting Vietnam on par with Japan as a global growth leader. The government's tourism plan now targets forty-five to fifty million international arrivals by 2030 and roughly seventy million by 2045, with a striking environmental clause requiring all coastal destinations and tourism services to eliminate single-use plastics and non-biodegradable bags by the end of the decade. Yet this ascent collides with three structural pressures that will define the country's tourism product through the rest of the century: climate change, severe pollution, and the rapid build-out of AI-driven hyperscale infrastructure on a grid that is still roughly half coal-fired.

The geography of Vietnamese tourism is, with unusual precision, also the geography of its environmental stress. Halong Bay illustrates the pattern starkly. The UNESCO seascape already absorbs more than seven million visitors a year and has lost about half of its 234 documented coral species; it generates an estimated 28,000 tonnes of plastic waste annually, of which roughly 5,000 tonnes reach the sea. The 2023 episode in which fishermen dumped polystyrene buoys en masse after a failed transition to "sustainable" aquaculture floats underscored that institutional capacity has lagged the bay's commercial ascent. By century's end the most-likely outcome is a "two-bay" Halong: a heavily managed industrial-cruise core around Bai Chay, with overflow pressure redirected to Lan Ha and Bai Tu Long under enforced visitor caps, mandatory grey-water treatment, and electrified day-boats. The karst pillars themselves are geomorphologically stable on a centennial timescale, but coral cover is unlikely to recover meaningfully, and Halong's brand will shift from pristine seascape to managed heritage seascape.

Hanoi presents a different vulnerability. The capital recorded an annual PM2.5 average of 45.4 micrograms per cubic meter in 2024 — nine times the World Health Organization guideline — and has repeatedly ranked among the world's most polluted major cities, with episodes of toxic winter smog as recent as late 2025. The drivers are heavy motorbike and diesel traffic, construction dust, surrounding coal-fired cement plants, post-harvest straw burning in the Red River Delta, transboundary emissions from southern China, and stagnant winter inversions. Hanoi's pledged electrification of taxis and buses by 2030, the planned ban on combustion motorbikes in central districts, and the broader coal phase-out by 2050 will progressively cut local sources, but persistent winter haze will likely remain an intermittent reputational drag well into the 2060s even as the annual mean PM2.5 falls toward fifteen to twenty micrograms.

Ho Chi Minh City contributes nearly a quarter of national GDP and remains the country's pre-eminent business-tourism destination, yet it is among the world's most exposed coastal megacities. Government projections imply that some seventeen percent of the city's area would be inundated under a one-meter sea-level-rise scenario, with land subsidence of two to five centimeters a year in places compounding an absolute rise of roughly half a meter to three-quarters of a meter by 2100. The most likely city of 2100 is one ringed by levees and sea gates, with a relocated cruise terminal, sharply higher insurance and adaptation costs baked into hotel rates, and a tourism mix that pivots from waterfront leisure toward conferences, medical visitors, and cultural tourism in higher inland districts.

Heritage Vietnam will weather the century unevenly. Hoi An, sitting on the Thu Bon estuary, already endures routine autumn floods that damage its timber-and-brick architecture; under a likely fifty- to seventy-five-centimeter relative sea-level rise combined with more intense rainfall, permanent partial inundation of the lowest streets is plausible, and the town may evolve toward a managed-flood model akin to Venice's acqua alta, with scheduled boat-based tours during high-water periods and sensor-driven dehumidification of heritage timber. Hue's stone masonry is more resilient, though tomb sites in the surrounding hills face elevated landslide risk and the September-to-November peak-storm window will likely contract. By contrast, inland destinations are positioned to gain. Ninh Binh's limestone karst is geomorphologically robust and well outside coastal-flood reach; as coastal sites become harder to manage, inland karst will increasingly become Vietnam's signature landscape product. Phong Nha–Ke Bang, with its strict permit system already capping Son Doong at around a thousand visitors a year, approximates the right carrying-capacity model and is on track to become the country's flagship premium-eco product. Da Lat, at fifteen hundred meters elevation, will function as a thermal refuge from intensifying lowland heat and grow into the country's largest highland resort city.

The coastal-resort belt faces the steepest losses. Nha Trang Bay lost nearly two hundred hectares of coral reef between 2002 and 2024, with the area of "rich and healthy" coral collapsing from 6.65 square kilometers before 1980 to less than a square kilometer by 2019. Under any plausible emissions trajectory, reef-dependent diving will no longer be a viable long-term proposition; the resort cluster will pivot toward beach, wellness, and golf tourism, with AI-mediated virtual-reef experiences compensating for lost biological substrate. Con Dao, considered Vietnam's last coral oasis until 2024, suffered catastrophic bleaching in that year's global event — over ninety-seven percent of corals bleached at shallow depths, with complete Acropora mortality at survey sites — and will most plausibly endure as a simplified, Porites-dominated marine sanctuary serving fewer but higher-spending dive tourists. Phu Quoc embodies boom-and-bust risk: it generates roughly 160 tonnes of household waste and 37 tonnes of tourism waste a day against an overloaded landfill system, with about 1,036 tonnes of plastic leaking into the environment annually. The more probable scenario is a partial closure and reset sometime between 2035 and 2055, after which a smaller, higher-margin model emerges atop reefs that never fully recover.

The Mekong Delta is the highest-stakes destination of all. Upstream dams have cut sediment supply by seventy to eighty-three percent, with a projected ninety-six percent loss if all planned dams proceed; river-bed sand mining is deepening channels by ten to fifteen centimeters a year; groundwater extraction is driving subsidence of five to six centimeters annually in hotspots; and saltwater intrusion already affects about half the delta in dry seasons. Under a one-meter relative sea-level-rise scenario, forty-seven percent of the delta is projected to be inundated, with Ca Mau province nearly eighty percent under water; because relative rise will likely exceed one meter once subsidence is factored in, the central scenario is the partial transformation of the lower delta into a brackish landscape. The Cai Rang and Phong Dien floating markets are already in commercial decline as road logistics replace river-borne wholesale trade; their tourism existence by 2100 will more likely be heritage reconstruction than living commerce, and climate-driven outmigration of the delta's eighteen million residents will hollow out the labor base further.

Cultural tourism in the northern highlands faces a quieter but equally consequential shift. Sapa hosts roughly sixty thousand people across Hmong, Dao, Tay, Giay, and Xa Pho ethnic communities, and tour operators already report cultural erosion serious enough that some redirect clients to less-developed provinces. The most-likely Sapa of 2100 is sharply bifurcated: a heavily commercialized urban core organized around the Fansipan cable car and a Kinh-majority service economy, set against distributed community-tourism circuits across Lao Cai, Ha Giang, and Dien Bien where revenue retention by ethnic-minority households is higher. Climate change is less immediately threatening here than on the coast, but warming will gradually shift agricultural elevations upward, eroding the terrace-rice landscapes that are the visual basis of the product.

Threaded through all of this is Vietnam's rapid emergence as a regional AI infrastructure hub, and the dual face that infrastructure presents to sustainable tourism. The country's data-center capacity is on a trajectory toward an 870-megawatt national target by 2030, with the state-owned operator Viettel alone planning twenty-four new facilities. Multi-billion-dollar projects are in the pipeline, and a 2025 decree now permits one hundred percent foreign ownership in data centers and establishes a direct power-purchase mechanism for green-energy supply. On the positive side, AI is already enabling demand-management and crowd-dispersal systems, sensor-based monitoring of heritage timber and karst caves, real-time pollution forecasting, camera-trap and acoustic wildlife monitoring, smart-resort building management that can cut energy and water use by twenty to forty percent, and machine-learning identification of heat-resistant coral genotypes that may matter enormously at Con Dao. Real-time translation of Hmong, Dao, and Tay languages could meaningfully redistribute tourism revenue to non-Kinh communities. On the negative side, a hundred-megawatt data center consumes electricity equivalent to roughly 270,000 Vietnamese households, and on a still-coal-heavy grid the AI build-out will materially raise the country's emissions and water-stress profile through the 2040s. Algorithmic recommendation engines are concentrating visitors at a shrinking number of viral sites, the stage-managed-authenticity problem in Sapa is being amplified, front-desk and concierge roles are highly automatable in a sector targeted to deliver twelve million jobs by 2030, and international booking platforms are capturing margin that previously stayed in-country. The decisive question is whether the direct power-purchase mechanism actually delivers fully renewable supply to data centers before 2035; if it does not, AI will worsen the very climate problem it is being deployed to monitor.

The institutional architecture for managing all of this is converging. The Tourism Development Strategy embeds explicit sustainability and circular-economy targets; the National Climate Change Strategy commits Vietnam to net zero by 2050; the revised Power Development Plan 8 caps coal capacity at about thirty gigawatts through 2030 and phases out coal entirely by mid-century, with renewables reaching forty-seven percent of generation by 2030 and sixty-five to seventy percent by 2050; the Just Energy Transition Partnership has pledged 15.5 billion dollars, with roughly seven billion committed by mid-2025; and a pilot emissions-trading scheme launched in 2025 covers about half of national CO₂. The chief constraint is enforcement. Well-formulated rules on single-use plastics, waste treatment, and marine-protected-area fishing repeatedly under-deliver due to local political-economy dynamics. Vietnam's first marine protected area at Nha Trang has lost two hundred hectares of reef despite formal protection, a sobering signal of the gap between rule and result.

The dominant pattern, taken together, is geographic convergence. Vietnam's most economically significant tourism hotspots sit precisely on top of its most challenging pollution and climate stress points. The destinations most likely to remain world-class in 2100 are those whose governance is already built around strict carrying-capacity discipline, premium pricing that internalizes environmental costs, and AI deployments that augment rather than replace local human and ecological capital — Phong Nha–Ke Bang, Ninh Binh, Con Dao as a simplified-reef sanctuary, and portions of upland community tourism. Those most at risk of catastrophic loss are where governance is failing to keep pace: the lower Mekong Delta, Phu Quoc, and the heart of Halong Bay. Hanoi, Hue, Da Nang, Da Lat, and Sapa's upland circuits will likely be transformed but recognizable; Hoi An will be Venice-like in its high-water management; Ho Chi Minh City will be a sea-walled megacity whose tourism mix has shifted decisively inland. The boundary between Vietnam's tourism strategy and its environmental strategy has effectively dissolved. By 2100 the country's tourism product will be defined less by what its destinations contain than by how successfully Vietnam has managed three compounding stressors — climate change, pollution, and the environmental and social footprint of AI — at the geographic points where they intersect with its most iconic places. The century will not be kind to Vietnamese tourism unless the country bends every available lever toward the explicit recognition that its tourism economy and its environmental future are now the same problem.