7 - Managing Disaster Risk and Enabling Social Protection in Thailand: Some Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Summary

Introduction

This chapter seeks to examine how Thailand responds to disaster risks. When a disaster strikes and destroys assets and sources of livelihoods, the almost inevitable response of poor households is the use of coping strategies that are harmful to children, to save money on food and to reduce investments in children's health and education. What is required, therefore, is well-designed social protection that can play a key role in enabling households to avoid negative coping strategies and mitigate disaster impact. Disaster-sensitive social protection provides post-disaster relief and rehabilitation that helps households proactively adapt to the threat of natural disasters. By reviewing the contribution of social protection for protecting vulnerable households from the impact of natural disasters, this can contribute to the development of more effective disaster-sensitive social protection programmes in Thailand. This is especially in building household resilience and mitigating disaster risks in scenarios such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

While Thailand has developed a social protection system based on a rights-based approach, that considers different types of risks found in the different generations within the population, past social protection schemes have largely been designed to address normal situations, but not crisis situation. Hence, a mix of both proactive and reactive social protection is necessary in facing the challenges of future risks. The need to expand functional equivalents that support livelihood diversification, whilst rendering extensive support for vulnerable people, allows for a complementary approach that addresses not only protection against risks associated with certain events, but for building upon adaptive capacities so that the most vulnerable can sustain their livelihood. In moving forward, assessment of risks needs to consider sudden impacts of change such as those found during a pandemic outbreak or sudden financial crisis. A review of new types of social risks is necessary in the context of expanding the coverage of social protection schemes towards the country's most vulnerable. Furthermore, there is a need to translate resilience objectives into the design of social protection programmes and consider social protection as an important tool in managing risks that can reduce the impact of variability and extremes of new social risks.