BANGKOK (AlertNet) - Bustling Bangkok faces a danger more threatening than class divisions and political stalemate, its usual worries. It is sinking, scientists say.
This isn't a new discovery in a low-lying city where flooding is a way of life. Thunderstorms and high tides bring torrents of water to many of the city's neighbourhoods. For years, hundreds of pumps and a network of canals have been pumping floodwater back into the Chao Phraya River. Dikes and flood walls prevent the water from surging back into the city.
What is new is that soon these measures will no longer be enough. Climate change, expected to bring rising sea level and more intense rain storms around the world, threatens to overwhelm Bangkok's flood defenses, experts say.
"Right now Bangkok is sinking. And with sea level rise, these two factors are affecting flooding in Bangkok and they are not going to be ordinary floods," Bichit Rattakul, executive director of the Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre, told journalists on Thursday.
"It will take time to pump out the water from the city because the canals and the rivers are already filled up with water," he said.
Figures released last year from an ongoing joint study by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Japan Bank for International Cooperation on Asian Coastal Cities suggest economic damage in Bangkok could soar as a result of climate change.
Under a high economic growth and fossil-fuel intensive scenario worldwide, "by 2050 we will be looking at a four-fold increase in economic damage from flooding in Bangkok due to climate change impact of precipitation and sea level rise," said Bradford Philips, of the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre.
About a million inhabitants of Bangkok and the neighbouring province Samut Prakarn will be affected, the study predicted, and a third may have to live with a half-metre inundation for at least a week each year.
THREAT COMMON ACROSS ASIAN CITIES
Bangkok is not alone in facing these threats. Many of Asia's fastest-growing cities are dotted along the coast and are already vulnerable to storm surges and regular flooding even without the threat of climate change.
"In order for us to adapt to climate change in the long term, we have to better manage our existing vulnerabilities and better cope with the existing climate-related hazards that we face," said Anand Patwardhan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.
Part of that process should involve building stronger ties between scientists and organizations already focused on the impacts of disasters, such as the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre, he said.
Patwardhan was speaking at the start of a two-day regional meeting focused on developing a special UN report on climate change. The report, "Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation," is due to be released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2011.
Efforts to prepare the report include the first systematic and formal process to bring together scientists preparing for climate change and its consequences, and people working with communities to make them safer and more resilient to disasters.
In Asia, the report is expected to add to calls for governments to look beyond curbing emissions and toward adapting to climate change already occurring, particularly more frequent, intense and lengthy storms and other weather events.
The joint bank study, by the Asian Development Bank and others, predicts a doubling of the population vulnerable to severe flooding in Bangkok by 2050 if both economic growth and fossil fuel usage continues to grow.
Existing and planned flood protection dikes and drainage system will be largely inadequate to protect the western part of the city, it said.
But this scenario is preventable, Rattakul said, if action is taken.
"It can be adapted. We can make a correction to prevent these things from happening," he said.
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