With drought creeping across several provinces in the North and Northeast, focus is rightly being placed on immediate relief assistance for those most affected. The cycle of floods, drought and floods again has been stuck on repeat, with some years worse than others.
This year promises to be a particularly dry one for certain Asean neighbours, with Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore all worried about the impact on food prices, economic growth and even the stability of water supply. In Thailand, 18 provinces have already experienced some water shortages and 14 more expect to be affected. While it was heartening to see last week that water reserves in the Northeast were 46% higher than the same time last year, careful management will still be required to minimise the impact on farmers and residents. This week’s Spectrum examines the impacts and policies in more detail.
But while those bearing the brunt of the difficult dry conditions may have immediate problems, the time is ripe for a discussion about the broader issue of how the country adapts to climate change. Lurching from drought to floods and back again has become a reality, and the country requires more than season-by-season crisis management. With agriculture such an essential part of the Thai economy, policymakers and government agencies have shown little in the way of effort to reduce the country’s contribution to human-influenced climate change.
The latest Climate Legislation Study from Globe International and other research partners, which examined the policies of 66 countries, made it abundantly clear that Thailand has already felt the effects of humankind’s influence on the environment.
“Over the last decade, Thailand has experienced extreme weather phenomena and natural disasters on an unprecedented scale,” the report said. “In the 2011-12 monsoon season, severe flooding paralysed large parts of the country, including its capital, Bangkok. In combination with other factors, these events have increased awareness of climate change among Thai policymakers.”
This heightened awareness comes with a caveat: Many people are sceptical about climate change science and the impact human industry has had in altering the temperature of the planet. In a country where the seasons are hot, hotter and wet, it is naturally tempting to dismiss droughts and floods as an inevitable part of life.
Vinod Thomas, the Asian Development Bank’s director-general of independent evaluation, is among those who have argued that is wrong to think of disasters such as the 2011 floods as one-off events, saying rising populations and climate change are combining to leave more people more vulnerable.
“Environmental degradation, for instance deforestation, has left communities vulnerable,” he wrote. “And global warming is amplifying the power of hazards everywhere. Just as governments try to cushion financial shocks, so too should they invest in cutting disaster risk, as its consequences are just as grave.”
Should we accept Globe International’s conclusion that there is greater awareness, examples of action are harder to discern. Globe International outlined how the government has identified climate change as a major challenge for the 21st century and approved a strategic plan in 2008.
The plan, in theory, should be a framework that helps the country adapt to the changing climate, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, raise awareness among the public and support international cooperation. A master plan is being written for sustainable transportation, and in 2016 vehicles will be taxed according to their carbon emissions rather than the size of their engines.
On paper, these measures seem like progress, but the report also makes it clear that Thailand’s plans for adapting to climate change remain just that: plans. While “it is mentioned in several key policy documents”, the conclusion, inevitably, is: “As of yet, Thailand has not passed any concrete adaptation legislation.”
This might seem to be confirmation of the obvious, since there has been no attempt to limit the number of private cars on the road — in fact the first-car buyers’ scheme would suggest the opposite — and Bangkok’s decrepit bus network spews out black plumes of pollution.
Cleaner forms of public transport and reducing carbon emissions are clearly not a priority. But it is an important reminder nonetheless that nothing meaningful has yet been done to help the country, and those in the all-important agricultural sector facing the cycle of floods and drought, adapt to climate change. It is time for that to change.