Southeast Asia Forum: Flooding in Southeast Asia - Causes, Consequences, and Policy Challenges

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Over the course of 2025, large areas of Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam faced extensive flooding, with other countries likewise strongly affected during the year. These recent events have reminded people and policymakers across Southeast Asia of a broader trend of increasing flooding in the region, causing untold damage and disruption to people’s lives.

Questions about the causes of the flooding, its consequences, and the challenges of mitigation and adaptation are coming to figure more and more prominently on the policy agendas of governments across the region and of multilateral institutions concerned with climate change, environmental governance, and disaster risk management.

Against this backdrop, the LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre is focusing its annual Southeast Asia Forum on the growing problem of flooding across the region. The Centre has invited leading specialists on flooding in Southeast Asia from different countries in the region and different disciplines, methodological perspectives, and areas of empirical research focus. Their presentations will cover Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam and treat the causes, consequences, and policy challenges of increasing flooding from a range of different vantage points.

Speaker & chair biographies

• Dr. Nuanchan Singkran, Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies, Mahidol University
• Dr. Pamela Tolentino, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow
• Dr. Thong Tran, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
• Dr. Annisa Triyanti, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

*Banner photo by Iqro Rinaldi on Unsplash

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