Bangkok teetering, but Thailand still has chance to lead battle against climate change

The last five years have been the hottest since global records began. Asean countries, notably Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, especially heat waves and drought, as well as flooding brought by tropical storms. Thailand, as leader of the UN Group of 77 developing nations, must now act to implement an accelerated timetable for building a Paris Agreement fund to protect public health in developing countries and to cap global warming at 1.5C degrees.
According to a World Bank impact assessment, Asean countries are highly vulnerable to the major environmental effects of climate change, namely sea-level rise, increases in temperature ranges, progressively severe tropical storms, ocean warming, and ocean acidification, which destroys the food web. Both China and India have accepted the logic that global warming’s impacts also impair development because of the costs to human health. Ideologically-driven attempts to ignore this scientific reality in the only holdout, the United States’ Republican Party, appear increasingly peculiar. 
Thailand at present is relatively well situated as regards public health. However, most of Bangkok is only 2-3 metres above sea level, and the city is one of the world’s top 10 most vulnerable to rising sea levels. According to the United Nations environment agency, UNEP, in a business-as-usual scenario, the world’s temperature would increase by 2.9 to 3.4C degrees by the end of this century. Inevitably, public health will suffer as water-borne diseases such as cholera return to Thailand for the first time in decades.
The health impacts of global climate change can be divided into three categories: primary, secondary and tertiary. The first mainly concerns direct impacts, including floods, droughts, and heat waves, all of which are worsening in Southeast Asia and which affect Thailand cyclically, such as the floods of 2011 and last year’s heat wave. The secondary effects are those from ecological changes that alter disease epidemiology, for example cholera and dengue outbreaks, with Thailand being particularly vulnerable to insect-borne diseases. Tertiary impacts include famine, heat stress, and climate-related conflict. The health impact of global climate change will therefore increase the number of “natural” disasters.
These health impacts, including the tertiary effects, will increasingly affect Thailand. The country is not immune to hunger, famine or conflict. Globally, 795 million people are chronically hungry, with 161 million children under five being “stunted” – too short for their age. Climate change over the last 30 years has reduced agricultural production on this planet by an average 2 per cent per decade. As climate change worsens, agricultural output could decline even more. As a result, as many as 600 million more people could be at risk of hunger by 2080.
In Thailand, 16 per cent of children nationally suffer from stunting. Also, last year’s drought severely affected opportunistic fishing in roadside ditches by upcountry people desperate to provide a source of protein to their children. Water-starved impoverished rural farmers also confronted the Department of Irrigation as it sought to maintain the pressure of water flowing downstream to Bangkok to resist inflows of salt water into water purification plants.
In addition, Southeast Asia is a hotspot for emerging infectious diseases, some with pandemic potential, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, Zika, and H5N1 influenza. Infectious diseases thrive in Thailand’s climate and decimate the tourist industry. A “business as usual” scenario risks Bangkok slowly being abandoned as an administrative capital, becoming a mosquito-infested, disease-ridden Venice of the East, haunted by diarrhoea, dengue and malaria.
In light of the growing climate change effects on human health, termed “loss and damage” (L&D), the UN Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP22), presently underway in Morocco, must take steps to increase the Warsaw International Mechanism, the mutual assistance fund for assisting vulnerable countries. The approximately US$20 billion to be committed to L&D by 2020 is at least 15 billion short of what will be required according to Care International, one of the world’s most universally respected non-governmental organisations.
Moreover, the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), a UN lobbying bloc of countries most affected by climate change, now has 43 member governments, and via its Manila-Paris Declaration is insisting on a 1.5C limit to global warming. Three Asean countries – Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam – are already members of the CVF, and Thailand would be well advised to join and also insist on the 1.5C target because of the health impacts and need to develop pathways to save Bangkok. Only by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees can Thailand avoid having to plan for the evacuation of government from the city.
The CVF is presently lobbying at the COP22 for the G20, and especially the G7 most developed countries, to do more. The agreed goal is the need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions towards achieving “net-zero” by 2050, or even earlier. Some steps have already been taken. 
Thailand, leader of the G77, has one and a half more months to make a difference before its successor takes over the chair of the bloc. As well as lobbying to increase the L&D fund to combat the detrimental public health impacts of global climate change, Thailand must secure a commitment from the West to scale-up finance for technology transfer – key patents in terms of clean energy provision, such as solar and fusion development, both compatible with His Majesty’s philosophy of sufficiency economy. Only this will keep global warming under 1.5 degrees, save the health of the poor of this planet, guarantee their equity, and respect their rights as fellow human beings.