POLICY BRIEF: "Walking Alongside Communities: Supporting Community-Led Adaptation Resilience beyond Climate Change in Northern Thailand’s highlands"

Publication date:
July 2025

Publication: 
Walking Alongside Communities: Supporting Community-Led Adaptation Resilience beyond Climate Change in Northern Thailand’s highlands

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Author: 
SHAO Meng, Kassirin Phiboon

This policy brief examines how upland agricultural communities in Northern Thailand navigate climate-related and intersecting risks through community bonds that assemble existing resources and institutions, exploring the promises and pitfalls thereof. Findings from an Indigenous Karen community illustrate community-led adaptive responses oriented toward securing sustainable livelihoods. Recently this community has faced increasingly frequent weather changes and unstable water access, compounding existing vulnerabilities including insecure land tenure, limited community-based natural resource management rights, and barriers to access early warning systems and “damage and loss” compensation mechanisms. As climate change presents both slow-onset and abrupt changes while multiplying market and institutional risks, this research reveals that future climate adaptation policies should emphasize community characteristics and agency and avoid overly-centralized, top-down measures.