Flooding shows what lies ahead as Thai capital slowly sinks – ‘There is no going back. The city is not going to rise again.’
BANGKOK, November 8 (AFP) – The Thai capital, built on swampland, is slowly sinking and the floods currently besieging Bangkok could be merely a foretaste of a grim future as climate change makes its impact felt, experts say. The low-lying metropolis lies about 30km north of the Gulf of Thailand, where various experts forecast that the sea level will rise by 19cm to 29cm by 2050 as a result of global warming. Water levels would also increase in Bangkok’s main Chao Phraya River, which already regularly overflows. If no action is taken to protect the city, “in 50 years … most of Bangkok will be below sea level,” said Anond Snidvongs, a climate change expert at the capital’s Chulalongkorn University. However, global warming is not the only threat. The capital’s gradual sinking has also been blamed on years of aggressive groundwater extraction to meet the growing needs of the city’s factories and its 12 million inhabitants. As a result, Bangkok was sinking by 10cm a year in the late 1970s, according to a study published last year by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. That rate has since dropped to less than 1cm annually, they said, thanks to government measures to control groundwater pumping. If those efforts continued, the report said, they hoped the subsidence rate could slow by another 10 percent each year. However, Anond disputed their projections, saying Bangkok was still sinking at “an alarming rate” of 1cm to 3cm a year. While scientists may argue over the exact figures, they agree about what lies ahead for the sprawling megacity. “There is no going back. The city is not going to rise again,” the ADB’s lead climate change specialist, David McCauley, said. Faced with the combined threats of land subsidence and rising temperatures and sea levels, the World Bank has predicted that Bangkok’s flood risk will increase four-fold by 2050. […]
