Forum calls for measures to help ASEAN tackle climate change

Climate resilience has stopped being an environmental issue and become an economic one, experts said. When 35 percent of a year's rainfall falls within a single week, as it did in parts of Thailand last year, the failure is not simply meteorological. It is a failure of design, of coordination, and of economics.

That was the argument advanced at a CAsean Forum 2026 panel on "Strengthening ASEAN's Physical Resilience", held in Bangkok in August, where experts said Southeast Asia's climate exposure is no longer a side issue for environment ministries but a direct threat to the region's economic competitiveness.

Witaya Wannasuphoprasit, dean of engineering at Chulalongkorn University, framed Thailand's exposure through three converging failures.

First, rainfall patterns have become faster and more erratic than existing forecasting tools can track, overwhelming the drainage systems designed for a gentler climate.

Second, decades of unplanned urban sprawl have eroded the natural floodplains that once absorbed excess water.

Third, as Witaya termed most structurally damaging, roughly 50 Thai government agencies are responsible for water management, each with their own budget and agenda and little shared data.

Although rain poses a threat to regional development, Witaya said water is not merely a hazard to be managed but a productive resource whose value can be measured and grown.

Citing UN data spanning roughly two decades, he noted that water productivity — the economic value generated per cubic meter used — has stagnated across Southeast Asia even as other regions have steadily improved theirs, representing what he called "a big room of opportunity".

Witaya laid emphasis on empowering the local communities, describing efforts to build local "water schools" so that residents — not only central agencies — understand and manage their own flood and drought risks.

Wannaporn Phornprapha, founder and managing director of landscape architecture firm P Landscape Company, argued that much of the region's vulnerability stems from a design philosophy still rooted in "gray" concrete infrastructure rather than natural systems.

Asked to name planners' most common mistakes, she pointed first at fragmentation — designing single projects to withstand, say, a hundred-year flood without accounting for what happens beyond their boundaries, since "water has no boundary".

Second, she said regulation and data routinely lag behind the pace of climate change itself, citing the lack of research into which tree species actually filter fine particulate pollution effectively.

Third, resilient design is still widely perceived as an avoidable added expense when its real returns — public health, livability, and long-term value — are simply harder to put a number on.

Satoshi Iemoto, an expert affiliated with a Japan International Cooperation Agency project, said no single country can adapt alone, because climate risk ignores administrative borders — river basins and coastlines connect neighboring states regardless of policy.

He had three recommendations for the region: strengthen knowledge-sharing between countries facing similar disaster risks; empower local governments and communities, since disasters are ultimately experienced locally; and combine modern technology with traditional wisdom — from Thailand's sufficiency economy philosophy to comparable community-based traditions in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Cambodia.

Stripped of its technical detail, the panel's case was straightforward: ASEAN's physical resilience has been undermined less by a lack of engineering knowledge than by fragmentation — of agencies, of data, of individual construction projects, and of national policies that stop at borders that climate risks do not respect.

Fixing that, the panelists agreed, is less about inventing new technology than integrating what already exists: shared data, nature-based design, community knowledge and cross-border cooperation.

As the moderator summarized in closing, resilience cannot be built by any single country, sector or discipline acting alone — it has to be, in Witaya's phrase, "everybody's responsibility".

THE NATION, THAILAND