Participatory flood risk management: A case for policy implication from Ban Phai Municipality Thailand

Abstract

Northeast Thailand has been recently facing ‘shock’ to flash flood disasters during September-October 2019 especially in northeast region areas of Khon Kaen province at Ban Phai municipality (BPM) and many districts of Ubol Rachathani province. In Ban Phai, in particular, there has been no such a 500 mm rainfall recorded ever while the very heavily intense precipitation occurred during weekend days of 31 August to 1 September 2019. More than a thousands of households were inundated overnight of 31st August and many family members could not be evacuated but staying at the rooftop till early morning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqtn4IoLYos). In consultation with the Khon Kaen Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (KK-DPM) and the Office Water Resources Region 4 (OWR 4) they expressed the need on development and operational model for community involvement on flood disaster risk management, this would help these two responsible agencies together with Ban Phai Municipality and Ban Phai District Government to better manage future water-related disaster risk events. Our team members then decided to select Ban Phai Municipality to be the place under study on ‘participatory flood risk management’ (PFRM) while we expect the finding by this project will be a good show-case study that could be able to up scaled and replicate practice across NE Thailand cities.

We have reviewed and found that there still have never been introducing such this type of water-related disaster reduction practice model in NE Thailand. It focuses on strengthening the role of community actions on self-help and mutual-help among civil groups and active citizens. We have explored a number of guides and manuals on participatory action models working for flood risk management practice. We then wish to test this type of actions whether it will be working or fulfilling the missing flood mitigation gap in urban setting. We are planning to work with our boundary partners OWR 4, KK-DPM, Ban Phai District Office, Ban Phai Municipality, and local stakeholders. We also observed that during the recent heavy flood in Ban Phai many women, elderly, young children groups, low-income family, migrant workers, and many temporary houses, all these have been affected badly. We will organize a series of stakeholder engagement and shared learning activities (SELA) by; (i) organizing fieldwork participated by local stakeholders in exploring of insight information of flood impacted communities on their risk, vulnerability, and capacity management to flood hazard, (ii) holding a series of workshops in inventing and using simplified flood risk map and appropriate early warning methods and application for used by the communities, (iii) producing infographic and policy brief on raising awareness and concern on PFRM, (iv) organizing a press conference to deliver and disseminate project finding, and (v) holding the policy seminar on PFRM and urban flood mitigation policy and practice. We expect that our project will take at least 20 months to finish while working in the field we also hope to test the implementation model on the real situation of monsoon flood in 2020.

Lead contact

Dr. Yanyong Inmuong

Mahasarakham University, Thailand

Email: yanyong.i@msu.ac.th;  yanyong.inmuong@gmail.com