Eideard

As some of Thailand’s worst flooding in half a century bears down on Bangkok — submerging cities, industrial parks and ancient temples as it comes — experts in water management are blaming human activity for turning an unusually heavy monsoon season into a disaster.

The main factors, they say, are deforestation, overbuilding in catchment areas, the damming and diversion of natural waterways, urban sprawl, and the filling-in of canals, combined with bad planning. Warnings to the authorities, they say, have been in vain.

“I have tried to inform them many times, but they tell me I am a crazy man,” said Smith Dharmasaroja, former director general of the Thai Meteorological Department, who is famous here for predicting a major tsunami years before the one that devastated coastal towns in 2004.

The monsoon season this year has brought disaster to Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam as well as Thailand, where 283 people are reported to have died.

Thousands of people have been displaced as typhoons have battered the Philippines, and the country’s steep rice terraces of Banaue are reported to have been damaged by mudslides.

Floods have spread through Cambodia, where the city of Siem Reap is reported to be knee-deep in water, with floodwaters reaching the nearby temples of Angkor.

Thai officials are warning that, in the next few days, Bangkok could be inundated by a combination of heavy floodwaters from the north, unusually high tides and monsoon rains. People in some of the most threatened neighborhoods are building sandbag barriers around their homes and emptying shops of food, drinking water, batteries and candles…

Once the floodwaters reach Bangkok, they will pour into a city that has lost its natural defenses: a huge network of canals that have been filled in — or clogged with garbage — as the city has become an overcrowded behemoth.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. It doesn’t require warnings on a biblical scale to explain that stupidity and greed combine and grow over time to produce an almighty disaster.

An innovative program to encourage sustainable farming in rural China has helped restore eroded forestland while producing economic gains for many farmers, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.

“The Sloping Land Conversion Program, which began in 2000 after massive flooding caused in part by land clearing, focuses on China’s largest source of soil erosion and flood risk — farms on steep slopes,” said study co-author Gretchen Daily, a professor of biology at Stanford.

The program aims to return more than 37 million acres of cropland on steep slopes back to forest or grassland. The government pays villagers in varying amounts of cash and rice to give up farming and find new sources of employment.

“It’s a tremendously innovative program designed to address two critical problems — securing the environment and providing economic opportunities for people in rural, desperately poor areas,” said Daily…

China’s land conversion program has its roots in the late 1960s, when farmers in the mountainous western provinces began clearing vast stretches of land to make way for more crops. The increased agricultural production helped feed a growing nation but also set the scene for disaster. When record monsoon rains pelted the region in 1998, soil from the agricultural fields washed down the mountain slopes, killing thousands of people in the villages below.

The unprecedented damage caused by the floods prompted China to reconsider the wisdom of replacing forests with farms — especially in steeply sloping terrain. In 2000, the government launched a campaign to reforest the countryside and established several large-scale programs to help farmers in the western provinces find new work in surrounding cities…

Ecologically speaking, China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program has been a clear win since it was implemented a decade ago, said Daily, noting that the program has helped to decrease soil erosion by as much as 68 percent in some areas…

On average, families that participated in the program reported doing better financially than those who did not, but some farm workers had trouble finding new work, according to the study. Households that profited most did so by sending a husband-and-wife team into the city to earn money as unskilled laborers. The wages they earned in the city combined with the government subsidy easily topped what they had earned as farmers…

Finding your way politically and socially through qualitative social and economic changes is difficult enough under the best of circumstances. Fortunately, the world at the beginning of the 21st Century seems to be a bit more willing to lend a hand than that era defined by Cold War polemics.

RTFA for lots of details.

A flood water sign flattened by the Burnett River

From the GUARDIAN Eyewitness series

Pakistanis crowd around an army helicopter as it delivers desperately needed food supplies to the village of Tul in Sindh Province, southern Pakistan, which is surrounded by floodwaters.

PAKISTAN — Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Sunday said that the flood had caused losses worth billions of rupees and it was not possible to estimate the exact damages caused by the floodwaters at this time.

The premier, who was in Sukkar to review the flood situation, said that the government’s first priority was to save the lives of flood-hit victims. We have to combine our efforts in the relief and rehabilitation process, he added.

“Millions of people have suffered and still there is more rain and further losses are feared. I appeal to the world to help us, we are doing what we can,” Gilani told reporters, as he urged those threatened by the “unprecedented” floods to move to safer spots…

While talking to the media in Sukkar, Gilani said that the damages caused by the floods exceeded the destruction caused by the earthquake that hit Pakistan in 2005.

14 million people are dislocated. The official death toll has reached 1700 and hundreds more are missing and possibly dead. Whatever charity you may support that provides aid to South Asia – this is the time to give.

Photo courtesy Stanley Tom

The indigenous people of Alaska have stood firm against some of the most extreme weather conditions on Earth for thousands of years. But now, flooding blamed on climate change is forcing at least one Eskimo village to move to safer ground.

The community of the tiny coastal village of Newtok voted to relocate its 340 residents to new homes 9 miles away, up the Ninglick River. The village, home to indigenous Yup’ik Eskimos, is the first of possibly scores of threatened Alaskan communities that could be abandoned.

Warming temperatures are melting coastal ice shelves and frozen sub-soils, which act as natural barriers to protect the village against summer deluges from ocean storm surges.

“We are seeing the erosion, flooding and sinking of our village right now,” said Stanley Tom, a Yup’ik Eskimo and tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council…

Newtok is just one example of what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns is part of a growing climate change crisis that will displace 150 million people by 2050…

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has estimated that moving Newtok could cost $130 million. Twenty-six other Alaskan villages are in immediate danger, with an additional 60 considered under threat in the next decade, according to the corps.

Of course, we could just sit back and listen to the country club set discuss it to death for another forty years.

Indian troops and aid workers are struggling to reach hundreds of thousands of stranded people across flood-devastated northern India. Nearly half of the 1.2 million people displaced by the rising flood waters after the Kosi River burst in Nepal two weeks ago have been rescued said Prataya Amrit, a disaster official in the Indian state of Bihar.

The massive relief effort was the first to deploy all three branches of India’s military: the army, the navy and the air force, said Amrit.

Despite having more than 5,000 troops deployed across the state to rescue marooned communities and provide food and medical supplies, the rising flood waters left even more villagers stranded…

The relief was disjointed, and many areas saw displaced people camped out on whatever high ground they could find – embankments, railway tracks, bridges.

Aid workers from Unicef and the European Union tried to work out how best to provide help and distribute aid.

“We are going from place to place trying to assess the needs of the people, see what gaps there are and how we can fill them,” Malini Morzaria, from the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid department, said.

At the end of the Cold War, the world discussed joint peaceful uses for our military. Neocon politics has taken all of that off the table. My homeland has assumed the imperial mantle still reeking of the British stain – that the sun was never supposed to escape.

I have no doubt that NGO’s from the United States and Canada are delivering aid as quickly as possible. Bush and Cheney – and McCain – are focused on getting a billion dollar$ to Georgia to buy more tanks.