Vietnam’s Typhoon Crisis: Navigating a New Normal of Extreme Weather

By Ephraim Agbo 

As Typhoon Kalmaegi carved a destructive path across the central Philippines in early November 2025 and pushed west toward Vietnam, the event became the latest in a string of storms that have tested Hanoi’s disaster systems and the resilience of coastal communities. The immediate human toll and the growing economic price-tag are alarm bells: emergency managers are now grappling not just with single storms but with the compound effect of repeated hits in the same river basins, mangrove belts and coastal cities.

The immediate story: Kalmaegi’s fast, brutal strike

Kalmaegi — locally known in the Philippines as “Tino” — produced catastrophic flash floods and landslides across central Philippine islands, with initial tallies reporting more than 100 deaths and many more missing; the archipelago declared states of emergency as rescue teams scrambled to reach submerged towns. As the cyclone moved into the South China Sea it maintained enough strength to threaten Vietnam’s central provinces, prompting large-scale evacuations and pre-positioning of search-and-rescue assets. Early reporting put the number of displaced and evacuated people in the Philippines in the hundreds of thousands; Vietnam authorities ordered evacuations across multiple provinces ahead of landfall. These time-stamped operational figures are provisional and will be revised as post-event assessments conclude.

Why this matters: Kalmaegi was not an isolated shock. It arrived in a landscape already weakened by prior 2025 storms and, in places, by recent seismic events — conditions that raise the risk of cascading failures (dam breaches, landslides in denuded hillsides, and protracted humanitarian need).

Recent context: a year of compounding storms

Vietnam’s 2024–2025 typhoon season has included several extreme events that together show how repeated cyclones amplify harm.

• Yagi (Sept 2024). Northern Vietnam’s encounter with Yagi produced some of the country’s most damaging weather in recent decades. Government and multi-agency post-event estimates placed losses at tens of trillions of dong (final government figures reported in late-2024 at roughly VND 84–85 trillion, or about US$3.3–3.5bn), with hundreds of lives lost, widespread housing destruction and severe agricultural damage — a shock that dented growth forecasts and strained local fiscal capacity.

• Kajiki (Aug 2025). Officials undertook mass evacuations ahead of Kajiki’s landfall; the storm flooded urban streets, damaged thousands of homes and caused fatalities and significant agricultural losses. The scope of evacuations — several hundred thousand in some provincial tallies — underlined the familiar trade-off: early warning saves lives but large-scale, repeated evacuations carry social and economic burdens.

• Bualoi (Sept 2025). Bualoi’s prolonged inland rain bands produced riverine flooding and landslides across northern and central provinces, compounding recovery timelines after Kajiki. Rapid assessments recorded dozens of fatalities, major infrastructure damage and an extended humanitarian footprint.

Taken together, these storms show the operational reality for disaster managers: recovery from one event was still incomplete when the next struck, multiplying vulnerability and reconstruction costs.

Forecasting, rapid intensification and the climate signal

Forecast skill for tropical cyclone tracks has improved materially thanks to ensemble NWP products and wider international coordination, allowing longer lead-times for large-scale evacuations. Yet uncertainties remain: forecasting extreme localized rainfall, storm surge heights in complex estuaries, and sudden rapid intensification events still challenge operational decision-making. Model disagreement on rainfall hotspots means first responders must weigh false alarms against the risk of under-warning — a difficult calculus in densely populated deltas.

The broader climate context matters. The IPCC’s assessments and peer-reviewed literature conclude with medium-to-high confidence that a warmer atmosphere and ocean increase extreme precipitation associated with tropical cyclones and likely raise the share of very intense storms. That does not mean every storm is “caused” by climate change; attribution requires careful, event-level analysis. But the observed trends — heavier rainfall extremes and the potential for stronger Category 4–5 events — align with the sharp rise in compound disasters across Southeast Asia in recent years.

What has improved — and where gaps remain

Vietnam’s disaster architecture shows clear advances: earlier warnings, larger pre-emptive evacuations, and more robust civil–military logistics have demonstrably reduced the avoidable loss of life in many settings. International information-sharing and aid coordination have also become faster.

Yet gaps persist:

• Compounding exposures. Repeated storms erode natural defenses (mangroves, dunes) and damage infrastructure that would otherwise shield communities from the next event.
• Localized forecasting & decisions. Translating model uncertainty into precise, community-level evacuation orders remains a bottleneck.
• Social and economic recovery. Rapid damage tallies under-report long-term impacts — lost cropping seasons, disrupted schooling and the mental-health burden of recurrent displacement.
• Fiscal strain. Successive high-cost disasters place heavy demands on provincial budgets and insurance markets, complicating reconstruction choices.

Economic implications and the policy trade-offs

Policy choices now must balance short-term life-saving measures with medium-term resilience investments. Engineering fixes (dykes, hardened grids) come with high fiscal and ecological costs; nature-based solutions (mangrove restoration, floodplain zoning) require political will and long timelines but offer layered, flexible defenses. Equally important are social protections and climate-literate land-use planning that reduce exposure ahead of the next inevitable storm season.