Pita Limcharoenrat, leader of the Move Forward Party (MFP), proposed on Tuesday a sustainable solution to combat the forest fires raging through northern Thailand by utilizing “resources, local community, and technology.”
According to Pita, 89,042 rai of land are affected by forest fires every year. The Move Forward leader suggested three solutions.
- Local Community: The idea to protect the environment is to allow the people who live closest to them to have access to necessary resources and are the ones to take care of them, while the centralized government needs to take a step back and act in a supporting role to assist communities on matters they are unable to solve independently.
- Resources: The central government, as a supporting role, should allow for local autonomy in decision-making and funding [to local communities].
- Technology: To purchase technological devices that specialize in dousing forest fires, such as the Airtanker DC-10 that can carry up to 44,000 liters of water, which is 14 times more than the KA-32 that is currently used in Thailand.
Pita stated the government should accept that there are not enough technological resources to be used and they should ask for international assistance, such as neighboring Asia Pacific countries (Singapore, China, Australia, and New Zealand) that specialize in technology for forest fires.
This is not a situation that one needs to feel shame in asking for help, but a crisis in which there needs to be unity within the international community.
There are many examples of international assistance, such as Singapore assisting Thailand by sending two helicopters equipped with fire extinguishing equipment in 2015, during the tsunami in 2003, and during the cave rescue mission in Chiang Rai province where the international community were willing to lend a helping hand.
