The Thai capital, built on swampland, is slowly sinking and the floods currently besieging Bangkok could be merely a foretaste of a grim future as climate change makes its impact felt, experts say.
The low-lying metropolis lies about 30km north of the Gulf of Thailand, where various experts forecast that the sea level will rise by 19cm to 29cm by 2050 as a result of global warming.
Water levels would also increase in Bangkok’s main Chao Phraya River, which already regularly overflows.
Photo: Reuters
If no action is taken to protect the city, “in 50 years ... most of Bangkok will be below sea level,” said Anond Snidvongs, a climate change expert at the capital’s Chulalongkorn University.
However, global warming is not the only threat. The capital’s gradual sinking has also been blamed on years of aggressive groundwater extraction to meet the growing needs of the city’s factories and its 12 million inhabitants.
As a result, Bangkok was sinking by 10cm a year in the late 1970s, according to a study published last year by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.
That rate has since dropped to less than 1cm annually, they said, thanks to government measures to control groundwater pumping.
If those efforts continued, the report said, they hoped the subsidence rate could slow by another 10 percent each year.
However, Anond disputed their projections, saying Bangkok was still sinking at “an alarming rate” of 1cm to 3cm a year.
While scientists may argue over the exact figures, they agree about what lies ahead for the sprawling megacity.
“There is no going back. The city is not going to rise again,” the ADB’s lead climate change specialist, David McCauley, said.
Faced with the combined threats of land subsidence and rising temperatures and sea levels, the World Bank has predicted that Bangkok’s flood risk will increase four-fold by 2050.
And the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has classified the Thai capital among the 10 cities in the world facing the biggest potential impact from coastal flooding by 2070.
For now, Bangkok is relying on a complex system of dykes, canals, locks and pumping stations to keep the rising waters at bay.
However, the flood protection efforts failed to prevent an onslaught of run-off water from the north from swamping at least one-fifth of the capital.
The murky floodwaters, triggered by three months of heavy monsoon rains, are edging in on Bangkok’s glitzy downtown area, threatening luxury hotels, office buildings and shopping malls.
Rapid urbanization is one reason why the inundations are affecting the sprawling city so badly, according to experts.
As the area that needs flood protection gets larger and more built-up, the water “has fewer places to go,” said Francois Molle, a water management expert at France’s Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement.
Molle said that in the long term, Bangkok would eventually be under water.
“The only question is when,” he said.
Experts say Thai authorities must address the capital’s land use and planning challenges and consider relocating factories or industrial parks in flood-prone areas.
Or even moving the entire city.
“It may be appropriate for the people who want to be dry 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to be setting up a new city,” Anond said.
“We do have areas where we can develop a new city that would be completely dry. There’s a lot of land in this country,” he said.
It may sound like a drastic scenario, but there is little doubt that Bangkok will have to act if it wants to avoid the fate of the fabled sunken city of Atlantis.
“To remain where it is, the city will need better protection,” said Robert Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at Britain’s University of Southampton.
He said he expected Bangkok’s current flood misery to “trigger massive investment in defenses over the next 10 to 20 years.”
Dealing with the phenomenon will be expensive elsewhere too. Across the Asia-Pacific region the ADB has estimated it will cost a minimum of US$10 billion a year to adapt to climate change.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is constructing a new counter-stealth radar system on a disputed reef in the South China Sea that would significantly expand its surveillance capabilities in the region, satellite imagery suggests. Analysis by London-based think tank Chatham House suggests China is upgrading its outpost on Triton Island (Jhongjian Island, 中建島) on the southwest corner of the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), building what might be a launching point for an anti-ship missile battery and sophisticated radar system. “By constraining the US ability to operate stealth aircraft, and threaten stealth aircraft, these capabilities in the South China Sea send
HAVANA: Repeated blackouts have left residents of the Cuban capital concerned about food, water supply and the nation’s future, but so far, there have been few protests Maria Elena Cardenas, 76, lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street. “You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city. Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food
Botswana is this week holding a presidential election energized by a campaign by one previous head-of-state to unseat his handpicked successor whose first term has seen rising discontent amid a downturn in the diamond-dependent economy. The charismatic Ian Khama dramatically returned from self-exile six weeks ago determined to undo what he has called a “mistake” in handing over in 2018 to Botswanan President Mokgweetsi Masisi, who seeks re-election tomorrow. While he cannot run as president again having served two terms, Khama has worked his influence and standing to support the opposition in the southern African country of 2.6 million people. “The return of
SOUTH CHINA SEA TENSIONS: Beijing’s ‘pronounced aggressiveness’ and ‘misbehavior’ forced countries to band together, the Philippine defense chief said The Philippines is confident in the continuity of US policies in the Asia-Pacific region after the US presidential election, Philippine Secretary of Defense Gilberto Teodoro said, underlining that bilateral relations would remain strong regardless of the outcome. The alliance between the two countries is anchored in shared security goals and a commitment to uphold international law, including in the contested waters of the South China Sea, Teodoro said. “Our support for initiatives, bilaterally and multilaterally ... is bipartisan, aside from the fact that we are operating together on institutional grounds, on foundational grounds,” Teodoro said in an interview. China’s “misbehavior” in the South
RSS