Thailand Drought Risk Management: Macro and Micro Strategies

Thailand's climate is tropical; it has high temperature and humidity and is dominated by monsoons. The average rainfall, recorded from 1950 to 1997, is 1,374mm/year or equivalent to 702,610 Million Cubic Meter (MCM), which is much greater than the global average rainfall of 990mm/year. During the past 10 years, the annual rainfall has been positively deviant from the annual average (Fig. 1). In addition, results from climate-model simulations for the 21st century (Bates, Kundzewicz, Wu, & Palutikof, 2008) show that droughts should not be a problem in Thailand because of increased precipitation, soil moisture, and runoff and Thailand only experiences slight increase in evaporation. Therefore, it can be said that “droughts” change from country to country.