By Paritta Wangkiat
Bangkok Post-9 August 2018
First published in the Bangkok Post and accessible at: https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1518454/reckless-development-sows-seeds-of-disaster
As monsoon rains have struck the Mekong region recently, some countries have been hit hard by flooding. These disasters reflect the fact that the region’s development projects have not fully recognized climate change impacts and so lack plans to deal with them.
An unexpected climate pattern—unusually high rainfall—is linked to the July 23 failure of an auxiliary dam of the Xe Pien-Xe Namnoy hydropower project in Attapeu province in southeastern Laos.
Floodwaters from the broken dam submerged six entire villages downstream, killing at least 31 people and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes. The floodwaters then moved further to Cambodia’s northern region, forcing the evacuation of thousands of other people who did not receive any early warnings.
Similarly, at least 150,000 people in Myanmar have left their homes in the recent widespread flooding caused by heavy downpours last week. A New York Times report cited U Kyaw Swa, an environmental activist, saying the government issued flood warnings only after nearly 24 hours of inundation at his home in eastern Myanmar.
In northeastern Thailand, the Mekong River’s water has rapidly risen and flooded some border provinces. Residents reported that the rising water came earlier than usual. They also noticed irregular rainfall patterns in which the occurrence of heavy rain has been more concentrated in certain areas, instead of spreading over wide areas as had happened before. That means some parts of the northeastern provinces have remained unusually dry.
Along with poor disaster preparedness and mitigation measures, the extreme weather has been blamed for the recent flooding. But what has been missing in the conversation is the fact that affected people have limited capacity to cope and adapt to rapid environmental changes. So they have become more vulnerable to the disasters.
Most Mekong nations were ranked among the world’s top 20 countries most affected by extreme weather events between 1997 and 2016, according to the Global Climate Index Risk 2018 introduced by the German think tank Germanwatch. Among 182 countries, Myanmar is ranked 3rd, Vietnam 8th, Thailand 9th, and Cambodia 15th in terms of extreme weather events, death tolls and losses.
Another report, Fragile Planet, released in March by HSBC, ranked Thailand 11th and Vietnam 14th among 67 developed, emerging, and frontier market countries most vulnerable to climate change. The report highlights the factors of vulnerability based on countries’ potential to respond to climate change covering areas including financial resources and national governance readiness.
This vulnerability has been reflected in the aftermath of disasters in the Mekong region. Once previous extreme weather events such as drought and flooding receded, affected people, especially the poor, became increasingly indebted due to loss of income and damage to farmland and properties. They were usually unable to seek formal loans to recover the losses.
As the poor get poorer, the rich, on the contrary, managed to recover from the disasters as they had access to financial resources. Climate change is actually widening the inequality gap in the Mekong region beyond our recognition.
To close this gap, scaling up local adaptation capacity—including providing access to low-interest financing and post-disaster insurance, introducing technology that can maintain crop productivity and improving warning systems—is urgently needed as much as cutting carbon emissions.
Some adaptation projects such as expansion of irrigation networks and multi-cropping have been adopting across the region, with financial support from both governments and international organizations.
However, relying on such efforts along won’t be enough if we want the Mekong region to become climate-resilient. If the ongoing exploitation of natural resources and unsustainable development are not seriously addressed in adaptation plans, the region won’t achieve such a goal.
Numerous development and infrastructure projects are designed based on a government’s economic growth targets or investor profits without acknowledging the impacts on local people, which could be accelerated by climate change.
Take dam building as an example. With its ambition to become the ‘battery of Southeast Asia’, the Lao government has nine dam projects either planned or under construction on the mainstream Mekong. At least 71 other projects are planned on tributaries. In Myanmar, another seven dams are proposed on the Salween River.
Most of these projects involve foreign developers and financial institutions, especially from Thailand and China. Some of them are driven by state policies to maximize the potential of untapped natural resources. The ultimate purpose of these dams, marketed as ‘renewable energy’, is to cater to the power demands of countries like Thailand, China, and Vietnam, and boost the economies of producing countries such as Laos. The development, however, overlooks climate change factors which will bring about more challenges to dam operations—just like the recent case in which the Lao dam structure couldn’t handle heavy downpours.
While they have to bear the brunt of development impacts worsened by the changing climate, local people in the region have additionally suffered from land grabs. Many cases of land confiscation and forced evictions are reported in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia where local communities have lost homes and farmland to state and private developments. They have been left to deal with deforestation and environmental degradation as a result of irresponsible development. How can they become climate-resilient when they are losing their natural resource capital and income sources?
Meanwhile, government and private institutions have not yet adapted to dealing with rapid environmental change. Banks make lending decisions basing on the profitability of development projects rather than their sustainability.
The traditional development mindset remains intact as governments and investors eye swift economic growth and overlook quality growth. Bureaucratic structures are ineffective in enhancing collaboration among state agencies to combat climate change. Political factors are also fostering irresponsible development.
Some government officials have put the blame on climate change as the single, ‘unavoidable’ cause of the recent flooding, not humans. That’s not true.
Even though the Mekong countries are not the world’s major carbon emitters like industrialized nations, they cannot afford to delay the adoption of sustainable development and low-carbon economy paths which can generate jobs for local people while keeping the impacts on natural resources at a minimum. By that means, people can become climate-resilient without sacrificing their livelihoods.
Paritta Wangkiat is a columnist at the Bangkok Post.
