Thailand: When a city of canals floods, what happens to waterway shantytowns?
By Trudy Harris
Sopon Lee recalls the dirty, stinking water that regularly swept through his wooden home in a slum on the edge of a Bangkok canal. Thailand’s annual monsoon rains often brought flooding to the city, forcing members of his family to grab their sodden belongings and race to higher ground.
[...]
The slum’s relocation along Lat Phrao Canal is a successful example of authorities working with the poorest people to protect them from the rising threat of floods. Asia’s megacities have long struggled to cope with flooding because of unchecked development, poor urban planning, and exploding populations. Experts in the region say they are seeing a shift toward projects that directly involve marginalized communities, as authorities try to build resilience across their cities.
But climate change is exacerbating the problem, bringing rising sea levels and abnormal weather patterns like increased rainfall and more powerful typhoons. In recent years, Bangkok has been dredging canals, moving slums that block them, and building tunnels and barriers in efforts to prevent the kind of disastrous floods that hit the Thai capital in 2011, killing more than 800 people nationwide. The experts warn much more needs to be done, especially to protect the most vulnerable people.
[...]
As with most flood disasters, poor populations are likely to be hit hardest. Across Asia, millions of rural poor people have flocked to the cities seeking better-paying jobs resulting from booming development, squeezing into whatever housing they can afford. East Asia is home to the world’s largest slum population of 250 million people, many of whom live in poor-quality housing on flood-prone land with limited access to basic services, the 2017 World Bank report said.
[...]