Sustainable water resource management in Tungkula Ronghai under intensifying extreme climatic events

Climate change have the immense impacts to sustainable development from country to local levels.  In the direct way, climate change-induced higher frequency and intensifying severity of extreme events have been already recorded worldwide.  Indirectly, the global co-operations towards more and more aggressive greenhouse emission reduction, e.g., to meet the Paris Agreement targets including carbon neutrality and net zero emission, have progressively driven the integration of emission reduction target into development plans at all levels.   These clearly indicate that climate change is one of the top priorities in the sustainable development agenda that has the impacts on every dimension.

In Thailand, studies in the past indicate that floods and droughts have significantly increased.   It is therefore crucial that appropriate measures to cope with the impacts need to be established, notably by considering the country’s circumstances and local characteristics.  This research program emphasizes on seeking new knowledge, synthesizing the current information to support the sustainable development and adaptation to the impact of climate change at the scale of local levels.  The issues of water resource management in the vulnerable area under climate extreme is the main focused.  In addition, supporting sustainable development through climate action on quantifying greenhouse gas emission and proposing the ways to reduce the emissions from agriculture, forestry, and other landuse are also included.  The study area is Tungkula Ronghai in the northeastern part of Thailand, where a long history to combat drought from the past to present has been accumulated.   However, under the climate change conditions, the drought problem in this area will be only aggravated.  In addition to this, the basic information to support sustainable development within this area is still limited, including the information of landuse dynamics and the associated greenhouse gas emissions.  The research activities under this program will be carried out through 6 projects with the overall objects to 1) determine the appropriate spatial scale for forecasting climate variable such as rainfall and temperatures that enable the effective water resource management within the target area, 2) determine the appropriate spatial scale of landuse and landuse change that enable their effective integration into the studying of climate extremes, their impacts and the estimate of greenhouse gas emission/removal, and 3) propose the suitable approach for managing the risks to floods and droughts in Tungkula Ronghai area.  

These 6 projects try to answer research questions so that the overall objectives of the program mentioned above can be met.  The key research issues include finding out the appropriate spatial scale of landuse, climate variables and drought forecast.  At present although there are studies on climate change in the area, but the spatial scales are too coarse so that when bring these to apply at local level, their practical uses are often very limited (i.e., forecast provides spatial resolution of 20x20 km, but drought actually occurs only part of this grid).  In addition, to effectively manage water resource at local scale, spatial characteristics and other relevant information of the focused area are needed (such as soil characteristics, saline soil distribution/their changes over time, evapotranspiration, surface flow and hydrological characteristics).  The spatial resolutions of these characteristics need to be in line with those of climate variable and landuse.  These must be obtained through scientific research so that its effective use can be expected.  The overall outputs of this research program are new knowledge, publication in international journal, models and prototype of how to apply remotely sensed data to water management and climate change risk, database and information of landuse and landuse change that connect the water management to greenhouse gas emission/removal.