Flooding adaptation and strategy for cultural heritage and landscape preservation: Challenges for the Lower Northern Region of Thailand is a two year project (2016-18) carried out by Naresuan University, Thailand and the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. The project has been funded by the British Academy and the Newton Research fund and it is a cross-disciplinary study looking at flooding adaptation strategies for the safeguard of cultural and natural heritage sites in Thailand. This project aims to examine flooding adaptation to preserve water-based cultural landscapes, particularly in the traditional settlements of Thailand. Water-based settlements and the way of living has been a unique cultural feature of Thailand, because people have
learned how to live in harmony with water.
Many water-based settlements have been intruded by rampant urbanisation, resulting in a fast decline of unique waterbased landscapes. Climate change has recently made water-based communities more at risk due to uncertain flooding. Flooding protection walls have been the most immediate and effective ways to protect communities from flooding; however there has been little research conducted in the fields of cultural landscape and heritage. Without flooding adaptation, it would be impossible to preserve both water-based tangible and intangible heritage; therefore, this area needs proper attention.
This study intends to do exactly this by addressing the following questions:
1) What is the relationship between climate change and heritage in Thailand ?
2) What are the current flooding adaptation strategies in place that allow the preservation of water-based cultural landscapes, particularly in the traditional settlements of Thailand?
3) How is flooding affecting the relationship between local heritage sites and local communities in Thailand?
4) What lessons can be learnt by Thai case studies and to what extent these could be applied to the UK?
Through this project we aim to develop new strategies for flooding adaptation but also to explore the cultural effects that flooding has had and is having on local heritage sites and local communities.