Story by Anna Lawattanatrakul
Additional reporting by Ratcha Satitsongtham

Nestled in the mountains of Chiang Rai’s Wiang Pa Pao District is Huai Hin Lad Nai village, an Indigenous Karen community named Thailand’s first Indigenous way of life protection zone. The community lives on over 10,000 rai of forest land, only 1632 of which are utilized. Their efforts have won them several conservation awards, including the UN Forest Hero Award.

In September 2024, the community was devastated by floods and landslides described as once-in-a-lifetime.

The Huai Hin Lad Nai village in October 2024, while community members are cleaning up after the landslides. 
(Photo by Ratcha Satitsongtham)

The community was subsequently accused of being the cause of the flood. Several video clips and news reports alleged that the community’s rotational farming tradition involves deforestation. One Facebook page posted an aerial picture of the community and claimed that their practice of monocropping means that trees cannot grow on the mountain, while some academics have claimed that they were responsible for deforestation and the resulting natural disaster.

Civil society organizations, including the Northern Development Foundation, responded. In a statement, the Northern Development Foundation and the Northern Peasant Federation said that such media reports perpetuate a negative stereotype of Indigenous communities and that they added insult to injury by spreading misinformation against a community suffering from the effects of a natural disaster.

The community is now well on its way to recovery, but debates continue about the role of traditional knowledge in disaster prevention and whether Indigenous communities should be given a larger role in disaster response.

Once in many centuries

Nivate Siri (Photo by Ratcha Satitsongtham)

68-year-old Nivate Siri, one of the Huai Hin Lad Nai community leaders, said that the floods and landslides came after days of constant heavy rain, and that he has never seen such severe landslides in the village.

On the day of the flood, Nivate woke up to the sound of the flood and logs coming down with the landslide. He found the schoolhouse damaged, while the trees behind the building had fallen over. He then returned to warn the rest of the community to put their belongings and important documents on high places. The village is far from the nearest district office, he said, and it would be difficult to replace any damaged documents.

Nivate said that he has been told by experts that it was the kind of disaster that happens once every few centuries. He noted that some of the community’s rice paddies and tea plantations were damaged in the flood, and that some families lost their pigs. He also said that they usually grow vegetables in the rice paddies after harvesting the rice, but they had to delay the vegetable planting as they had to clear pieces of lumber from the field.

Chaithawat Chomti (Photo by Ratcha Satitsongtham)

Meanwhile, Chaithawat Chomti, another community member, said he was in Chiang Mai when he learned about the flood. In the weeks after, he was responsible for coordinating a command centre overseeing the relief effort. The road up to Huai Hin Lad Nai was blocked. There was no running water, and phone signals were disrupted while the rain continued.

The damage was widespread, Chaithawat said. Crops were damaged, especially vegetables and rice grown in lower areas. The water supply system needed to be repaired. However, he said that a fund had been set aside to prevent food scarcity. He said he was unsure if the impact of the flood would continue in the coming years, but said that the community was not prepared as the disaster was unprecedented.

Once the community has recovered, Chaithawat said, they would have to use what they learned during the disaster and come up with a long-term monitoring system. He would also like Huai Hin Lad Nai to become a model community in disaster response and for them to share information with other communities living in high-risk areas.

Victims of climate change

Community members and researchers presenting the result of their research project at a February 2025 event at the Huai Hin Lad Nai village. (Photo by Kanwara Muenkaew/Northern Development Foundation)

Climate change and the lingering effects of past logging concessions are probably responsible for the landslides, according to a research project presented at a February 2025 event organized by the Huai Hin Lad Nai community, the Ban Pa Yueng community, the Northern Development Foundation, the Northern Peasant Federation, Maha Sarakham University’s Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies, the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre, the Thai Health Promotion Foundation, and the Global Social Enterprise Institute.

Jatuporn Teanma, lecturer at Maha Sarakham University’s Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies, said that a La Niña weather pattern caused heavy rain in the north of Thailand at the time of the floods. He also noted that a monsoon that should have moved into Myanmar stopped in Chiang Rai, causing continuous rain in the area. These phenomena are a result of climate change, which caused a higher than usual amount of water in the air.

Researchers found that the soil was carrying too heavy a load from the rain, eventually resulting in landslides. Trees in the area are all softwood of the same height and with no tap roots. In areas where there were no landslides, they found several canopy layers of canopies and a variety of tree types, which helps to absorb the force of rainwater falling on the canopy. Areas with a mixture of trees also have more complex root systems and so are less prone to landslides.

Jatuporn also said that landslides occurred in areas previously open to logging concessions before 1989. He said that this is why the remaining trees in these areas are mostly softwoods, which are not economically valuable and are not good at holding onto the soil. He concluded that the landslides and floods at Huai Hin Lat Nai are caused by unusually heavy rain due to climate change, noting that he has never seen corn growing in the area.

The research also found that the landslides occurred in forest areas protected by the community, which were not used for farming.

From victims to participants

After the landslides, Nivate said that community members kept watch around the village to guard against further incidents. Following knowledge passed down among their community, they observe the activities of animals, like insects and turtles. Animals moving to higher ground means a storm is coming, Nivate said.

Meanwhile, 70-year-old community leader Preecha Siri explained that there are often warning signs before heavy rain. Big-headed turtles and crabs in nearby streams would move to higher ground – all of which he noticed in the days before the flood. He also said that it was unusually hot.

In additional to traditional knowledge, he said, the community should be bringing in technology and science to come up with a response plan. He would like information to be collected and passed from generation to generation.

Preecha Siri (Photo by Ratcha Satitsongtham)

Nivate said that community members have become more active since the landslides, and that observing nature can help them survive. The community will need to come together and figure out a plan of action using both tradition and science.

But many of Thailand’s Indigenous communities are now unable to fully utilize their traditional wisdom. Prohibitive conservation laws and the public’s bias against Indigenous communities living in forest areas means that they are no longer able to live according to their traditional way of life, and despite being a signatory to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Thailand has never officially recognized any community as Indigenous.

Suwichan Phatthanaphraiwan, a lecturer at Mae Fa Luang University’s Liberal Arts School, said that the traditional way of life of Indigenous Karen communities, from how they build their houses to farming methods and predicting the weather from animal behaviour, lends itself to disaster response and relief. But modern limitations mean these traditions are disappearing.

Traditional houses, often single-storey and built on stilts to avoid flood, are often seen as temporary by officials. They are therefore not given a permanent address and do not have access to basic infrastructure like electricity and water, leading communities to turn to modern designs so they can gain access to these necessities. Some build houses on land they know is at risk of flood, but are not allowed to stay anywhere else.

And while in the past, communities have learned from history and move from place to place to avoid disaster, they are now unable to do so. Suwichan said that conservation laws now control communities’ way of life. Communities are living in areas they know are at risk. Some no longer let their animals roam the forest, partly out of fear that they would face prosecution, which means that they have less opportunity to patrol the forest and observe the signs that would have warned them that danger was coming.

Indigenous communities are caught in the middle, Suwichan said. They can no longer fully utilize traditional wisdom, but do not have access to modern disaster response knowledge. Society needs to learn about local traditions and utilize both wisdom and knowledge. Meanwhile, the government, academia, and the civil society must come together for a disaster response mechanism and build a body of knowledge about how to manage natural disasters in different contexts. Communities must also play a role in shaping mechanisms and collecting information. They should not be the ones who only follow orders, Suwichan said.

Legislation that limits communities’ capabilities should be changed. It should be part of the national agenda, Suwichan said, to develop a strategy for handling natural disasters that involves local communities. As the climate crisis leads to more severe disasters, Thailand could be model for its neighbours.

All roads lead to constitutional amendments

Huai Hin Lad Nai community members harvesting rice in their rotational farming land during the November 2024 harvest season 
(Photo by Ratcha Satitsongtham)

For Songkrant Pongboonjan, a lecturer at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Law, the obstacle lies in Thailand’s legal system. He explained that Thai law does not recognize communal ownership, although this has always been part of the culture. Resources are therefore either privately-owned or state-owned, and the state-owned ones are completely managed by the government. Thai forestry and conservation laws are written to give the government total control of forest lands and resources, and even communities who have lived on the land before laws were enacted have no right to them.

Not only are systems of communal ownership incompatible with existing legislation, but the general public also often has pre-conceived ideas about Indigenous ways of life. Songkrant noted how textbooks have perpetuated the idea that Indigenous communities caused deforestation by practicing “slash-and-burn” farming when, in reality, they practice a rotational farming method where they rotate around designated plots of land, allowing the soil to recover during the rotation and reduce the risk of soil erosion.

Centralization is part of the problem, Songkrant said. The government has total control when handling disaster situations, and local communities or civil society organizations can only participate if the government requests their assistance, such as during an emergency or when there is a shortage of manpower.

Such a system, Songkrant said, is inefficient. The fact that local governments are not authorized to respond to emergent situations and have to wait for an agency in Bangkok to act means disaster response takes time. Meanwhile, as natural disasters become more extreme, it becomes more apparent that the current system cannot handle them.

In December 2024, the Huai Hin Lad Nai community held a traditional hand-tying ceremony to bless the community after the disaster. 
(Photo by Ratcha Satitsongtham)

Fixing the issue at the root might have to start from amending the Constitution. The 1997 Constitution, which was said to be one of the most progressive and was repealed after the 2006 military coup, protected the rights of communities and individuals to participate in the management of natural resources and the environment. Songkrant noted that civil society had used these sections as a basis for campaigns for legislative changes or filing lawsuits.

As the fundamental document that serves as the basis for other legislation, Songkrant said that the Constitution should make clear that natural resources belong to every citizen, not to the state. It should protect the rights of communities and the right to public participation. If these principles are included in the Constitution, it will be easier to push for changes to other laws, such as conservation laws.

Songkrant said that if community rights to resources are protected, then it cannot be illegal for them to utilize these resources. Noting that he does not disagree with implementing strict measures to protect uninhabited forest areas with sensitive ecosystems, Songkrant said that it would be unfair to communities already living in forest areas if they are evicted or prohibited from making use of the land, and there needs to be different measures for these areas.