As millions of urbanites living a modern lifestyle fear that torrents of floodwater will rage through Thailand’s capital, some in enclaves of a bygone era watch the rising waters with hardly a worry — they live in old-fashioned houses perched on stilts, with boats rather than cars parked outside.
“No problem for them. They’ll be safe,” said boatman Thongrat Sasai, plying his craft along some of the remaining canals that once crisscrossed Bangkok, earning it the “Venice of the East” moniker.
Like most of monsoon-swept Asia, the city and its environs have experienced periodic floods since it was founded more than two centuries ago, but recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes — from intense urbanization to rising waters blamed on climate change — that are turning once burdensome, but bearable events into national crises.
“In a sense, traditional society had an easier coexistence with water and flooding,” said Aslam Perawaiz, an expert at the Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Center.
“Now, with such rapid development, there’s a much bigger problem,” he added.
Across Asia, areas of high population density are also those most prone to flooding and other water-related disasters, according to an analysis of recent UN maps. When overlaid, the maps show such convergence in a wide arc from Pakistan and India, across Southeast Asia, to China, the Philippines and Indonesia.
This is not mere bad luck. Historically, agrarian societies settled in the continent’s great river basins, including the Ganges in India, the Mekong in Southeast Asia and the Chao Phraya in Bangkok. The gift of the rivers was fertile land, but it came at the price of almost annual flooding during the monsoon rains.
By providing sufficient food for growing populations, these rice bowls in turn spurred the rise of some of Asia’s largest cities, from Bangkok to Kolkata, India. The concentration of national resources and wealth means even smaller disasters can have a big impact.
Severe flooding this year has killed more than 1,000 people across Asia and economic losses are running in the tens of billions of US dollars.
Thailand, suffering its worst flooding in 50 years, offers a prime example of the perils of centralization and man’s fractured bonds to the natural environment. Floodwater has spilled into outlying parts of Bangkok and the government is scrambling to try to prevent the inundation of the city center.
The basin of the Chao Phraya, the River of Kings, and its headwaters in the north is home to 40 percent of the country’s 66 millon people. Bangkok is Thailand’s industrial, financial, transportation and cultural heart, contributing more than 65 percent of its GDP.
Growth, outward and upward, has been stunning. Bangkok’s greater metropolitan area now covers more than 7,700km2 and it continues to gnaw away at a surrounding countryside that once acted as a natural drain for water from northern mountain watersheds — themselves shedding more water because of widespread deforestation.
Highways, suburban malls and industrial parks, many now swamped and sustaining crippling losses, create dangerous buildups of water or divert it into populated areas, rather than along traditional paths toward the Gulf of Thailand.
In Bangkok itself, streets where today’s middle-aged residents used to play with water buffaloes as children are studded with towering, cheek-by-jowl condominiums and office blocks. The ratios of green space to population and area are among the lowest of any major city in the world.
To this add extreme and erratic weather, said to be triggered by climate change, which has increasingly buffeted Asian countries with storms, typhoons and floods. These include ones such as Thailand with a historically mild tropical climate.
Further, the legal and illegal pumping of underground water faster than it can be replaced has compressed water-storing aquifers, causing Bangkok to sink between 2cm to 5cm each year. Scientists say the rise of waters in the nearby gulf as a result of global warming could combine with the sinking land to put Bangkok under water much of the time by the middle of this century.
Similar subsidence and sea-water encroachment is occurring in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Manila, where a typhoon last month triggered the worst flooding in the Philippine capital for decades.
Bangkok, some experts half-jokingly say, may well return to what it was in the 19th century — a water world where almost all its 400,000 inhabitants lived on raft-houses or homes on stilts.
“The highways of Bangkok are not streets or roads, but the river and the canals,” British envoy Sir John Browning wrote in 1855.
A century later, on advice of international development agencies, Bangkok began to fill in most of its canals — excellent conduits of floodwaters — to build more roads and combat malaria.
Sumet Jumsai, a prominent architect and academic, said that Bangkok’s early development “evolved with nature and not against it,” but, he adds, by the early 1980s the city had become “an alien organism unrelated to its background and surroundings, a great concrete pad on partially filled land that ... must succumb to the flood every year.”
Dikes and drainage pipes have been built, but nature appears to be keeping several steps ahead of these defenses.
“Of course, this year the flood is maybe too great to stop, but all in all it was better in the old days,” said Fairest Klatlek, sitting atop a poorly erected concrete flood wall through which water rushed into the first floor of her home.
She and her electrician husband, like most of their neighbors, had built a ground-hugging, modern house along the Bangkok Noi canal.
Sumet is designing modern, functional buildings, including a university campus, built on stilt columns and proposes a revival of floating houses, promenades and markets.
“The underlying philosophy is the return to living with nature, like in the Bangkok of yesteryear,” he said.
However, Aslam said: “I don’t think we can go back to living in harmony with nature as in the past. What is now necessary is huge investment and long-term planning by governments to mitigate such flooding.”
Additional reporting by Sopheng Cheang,Teresa Cerojano and Pailin Wedel.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this