Citing UN data spanning roughly two decades, he noted that water productivity — the economic value generated per cubic metre used — has stagnated across Southeast Asia even as other regions have steadily improved theirs, representing what he called “a big room of opportunity”.
In one pilot project, his centre worked with a Thai province to redesign water use planning, lifting agricultural output and generating tens of millions of baht in additional local revenue — evidence, he argued, that resilience investment can pay for itself rather than being treated purely as a cost.
Central to this shift is data. The centre is co-developing a “Thailand Climate Model” with MIT and international academic partners, aimed at using AI to predict rainfall with far greater speed and precision than…
