How we ended up engulfed

James Fahn – @JamesFahn – is a journalist on environmental issues in Southeast Asia, author of ‘A Land on Fire’ and director of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network
 

The search for a scapegoat might provide uncomfortable results.
The most obvious cause is simply an inordinate amount of rain – heavier than normal this year. But couldn’t the authorities, particularly those minding the dams upstream, have done more to regulate the floodwaters?
That’s the accusation put forth by Smith Dharmasaroja, head of the Natural Disaster Warning Foundation. He claims that more water should have been released from the Bhumibol and Sirikit dams earlier in the year so there’d have been less coming downstream now.
The authorities were apparently concerned that rainfall would again be relatively scant, as it was last year, and leave reservoir levels too low for irrigation needs. But this underscores the need for the dams’ varied uses to be prioritised. In this case, it seems that flood prevention was deemed less important than irrigation and power generation.
But there are at least two other causes of the floods that receive insufficient attention.
Development has for decades been carried out with almost no consideration for its impact. It’s not just that forests have been felled and wetlands have been filled in, removing natural reservoirs that slowed run-off.
Roads, housing estates and other facilities have been built with virtually no thought to their implications for water drainage.
Development doesn’t have to be this way. Innovative designers have come up with ways to build permeable surfaces, design landscapes and otherwise plan development to reduce flooding.
Unfortunately, a more difficult issue to address is climate change. Although it cannot yet be scientifically linked to individual weather events, we do know that increased and more intense precipitation, more extreme weather and sea-level rise are three of the major impacts we face.
Given the current stalemate in global climate-change negotiations, how can we respond? Certainly there’s a temptation to throw up one’s hands and say the problem is too big. That would be precisely the wrong response.
In fact, the threat of climate change makes it all the more urgent that we act locally – not only to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions but also to prevent flooding and other impacts of extreme weather. We need to protect forests and wetlands and plan developments more wisely.
If the current crisis helps authorities and citizens realise this, there’ll at least be one silver lining to the very dark cloud looming over Bangkok.