Flood impact on agriculture risk management

The Thailand floods during the 2011 monsoon season are known to be the worst flooding on record in terms of both the volume of water and the number of people affected. Large parts of the country were submerged in the upper northeaster part down to the central part of Thailand and impacted agriculture, economics and life in general to a great extent. Despite the gravity of flood damage and the importance of the agricultural sector, the process of assessing damages is limited. This study covers a broad scope of topics in an effort to bring together several factors that intersect floods and agricultural risk management. Detail probabilistic flood losses for direct damage and indirect/reversible were shown for future climate change. Result showed that climate change influences the most in rice field loss due to flooding and can affect both the quality and the quantity of the production. It also shows that mature rice is more vulnerable than maximum tillering rice stage under different flood depth. Vulnerability index used to qualitatively weigh the total damage likely inflicted on a given element-at-risk for agriculture sector. Uncertainties in flood loss and damage assessment models are inevitable. This research also focused on communication mechanisms to provide flood loss and damage information to end users by developing a hybrid framework for flood loss and damage uncertainty analysis and involvement of end users through questioner survey and focus group discussion. The findings demonstrated how the proposed uncertainty framework could be used to identify areas within the data management and transformation process that could benefit from further improvements.