Several Vietnamese seaweed species have economic importance as food for humans, as industrial materials, as ingredients in traditional medicine, and as biofertilizers. The nutritional values of nine representative Vietnamese seaweed species were analyzed. In this report, all of the species studied are rich in proteins, lipids (especially polyunsaturated fatty acids), vitamins, pigments, and macro-and micro-elements. The effect of the physiological activities of the green alga, Ulva reticulata, on hepatic fatty acid metabolism were examined in mice. The results indicate that Vietnamese seaweeds are abundant and have high quality materials for industrial and agricultural purposes.

Seaweed aquaculture beds (SABs) that support the production of seaweed and their diverse products, cover extensive coastal areas, especially in the Asian-Pacific region, and provide many ecosystem services such as nutrient removal and CO 2 assimilation. The use of SABs in potential carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) mitigation efforts has been proposed with commercial seaweed production in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, and is at a nascent stage in Australia and New Zealand. We attempted to consider the total annual potential of SABs to drawdown and fix anthropogenic CO 2 . In the last decade, seaweed production has increased tremendously in the Asian-Pacific region. In 2014, the total annual production of Asian-Pacific SABs surpassed 2.61 × 10 6 t dw. Total carbon accumulated annually was more than 0.78 × 10 6 t y −1 , equivalent to over 2.87 × 10 6 t CO 2 y −1 . By increasing the area available for SABs, biomass production, carbon accumulation, and CO 2 drawdown can be enhanced. The conversion of biomass to biofuel can reduce the use of fossil fuels and provide additional mitigation of CO 2 emissions. Contributions

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Biorefineries have been established since the 1980s for biofuel production, and there has been a switch lately from first to second generation feedstocks in order to avoid the food versus fuel dilemma. To a lesser extent, many opportunities have been investigated for producing chemicals from biomass using by-products of the present biorefineries, simple waste streams. Current facilities apply intensive pre-treatments to deal with single substrate types such as carbohydrates. However, most organic streams such as municipal solid waste or algal blooms present a high complexity and variable mixture of molecules, which makes specific compound production and separation difficult. Here we focus on flexible anaerobic fermentation and hydrothermal processes that can treat complex biomass as a whole to obtain a range of products within an integrated biorefinery concept.