Vietnam has experienced during the past decades unprecedented changes in its economy, land use, demographics, and natural environment. It had made significant progress in poverty reduction, but in 2010 around 20 percent of Vietnam’s population still lived in extreme poverty – about 27 percent in rural areas (World Bank, 2012).

In the next 15 years, new challenges linked to climate change could slow down poverty eradication in Vietnam. The country is particularly sensitive to climate hazards, weather variability and water‐borne diseases, and all of these shocks are likely to be exacerbated by climate change.

Assessing the impact of climate change on poverty remains however a daunting task. In particular, socioeconomic trends in Vietnam will determine the future impacts of climate change on poor people and on poverty rates as much as climate change itself (Hallegatte, Przyluski, and Vogt‐Schilb 2011). The impacts of climate change on poor people will be very different depending on where they live, which sector they work in, and the kind of social protection they benefit from (will the majority of poor people still live in rural areas? Will their income depend on agriculture and ecosystems or will they be more diversified?). It is not hard to imagine that if most workers work outside or without air conditioning, the impact of temperature increase on labor productivity will be stronger than if there is fast structural change away from agriculture and towards services and industry, with fast penetration of air conditioning. Similarly, a poorer household will have a larger share of its consumption dedicated to food and will therefore be more vulnerable to climate‐related food price fluctuations than a richer household.

Assessing the future impacts of climate change in Vietnam therefore requires an exploration of future socioeconomic development pathways for the country, in addition to future changes in climate and environmental conditions. To do so, we first assume that there is no climate change, and we explore possible counterfactual scenarios of future development and poverty eradication. Second, we introduce climate change into the picture and look at how it changes the prospect for poverty eradication.

It is impossible to forecast future socioeconomic development. Past experience suggests we are simply not able to anticipate structural shifts, economic crises, technical breakthroughs, and geopolitical changes (Kalra et al. 2014). In this paper, we _predict_ neither future socioeconomic change nor the impact of climate change on poverty. Instead, we follow the approach that is the basis of all IPCC reports, namely we analyze a set of _socioeconomic scenarios_ and we explore how climate change would affect development in _each_ of these scenarios. These scenarios do not correspond to particularly likely futures. Instead, they are possible and internally consistent futures, chosen to cover a broad range of possible futures to allow for an exploration of possible climate change impacts. People sometimes refer to these scenarios as “what‐ if” scenarios, as they can help answer questions such as “ _what_ would climate change impact be _if_ socioeconomic development followed a given trend.” The goals are to better understand how the impact of climate change on poverty depends on socioeconomic development, to estimate the potential impacts in “bad” scenarios, and to explore possible policy options to minimize the risk that such bad scenarios actually occur.

We start by analyzing the drivers of future poverty, and we explore the range of possible futures regarding these drivers to create hundreds of socioeconomic scenarios for Vietnam. This analysis combines 2