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arly this year, heavy downpours in what historically have been drier months flooded towns in the south of Thailand and on the border with Malaysia.

Heavy rainfall also inundated a northern city on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.

If governments in Southeast Asian localities do not start acting now, many vulnerable populations in the region will continue to endure significant impacts of weird weather events.

Climate change-induced impacts are not limited to heavy downpours; we have to expect heat waves, prolonged drought, and coastal flooding due to rising sea levels as climate change intensifies.

While national-level preparations and rescue are vital, Southeast Asia needs its local governments to place a premium on innovation ensuring that the burden of climate-related impacts is minimized.

Local climate resiliency must be high on the agendas of every local government.

Every village, municipality, city, and provincial government should therefore be equipped with institutional capacity for effective and efficient response.

By starting to plan and invest in local climate resiliency now — and by integrating these initiatives with other local units, local governments can lead the effort in reducing the vulnerabilities of many Southeast Asians to climate change.

Strengthening local institutional arrangements requires producing a portfolio approach to climate resiliency.

A portfolio approach entails situating climate projections and long-term climate change action plans locally.

This also entails an immediate adoption of local resiliency measures, monitoring how effectively (or ineffectively) they work, and continually updating the understanding of climate risk information and responses as the climate system and local resilience actions evolve.

A portfolio approach requires that local governments invest in resiliency measures that spread not only the local risks but also their resources, across multiple actors and categories.

This includes implementing locally based policies, such as upgrades in local building regulations, strengthening critical local protective structures and fortifying social safety nets.

This demands planning across local governments at the intervillage, intermunicipality, intercity and interprovincial levels.

This entails preventing disruptions to key infrastructure, especially road systems, during extreme weather events.

Local planning is key in terms of which places in the jurisdictions of a local government unit are most likely to need help, and how such help could be efficiently delivered on a timely basis.

To achieve this, integrated and networked preparations, across sectors and other local governments themselves, is vital.

This is especially necessary when emergency evacuations become necessary.

A cross-border approach to climate resiliency planning also includes strategizing for ways that consider the inter-connectedness of energy, water, transportation, telecommunications, sanitation, health, food and public safety systems across local spaces.

One important aspect of these plans, for instance, is to consider how inland floods or extreme droughts can affect the watersheds that supply drinking water to affected populations.

A key step to a portfolio approach to climate resiliency is to view it as a multi-actor effort. This means bringing together not only public officials in planning for resiliency.

Local government decision-makers have to work together with infrastructure managers, planners, citizen-groups and members of knowledge communities.

A multi-actor effort is a must to develop a shared understanding of specific climate change vulnerabilities and the climate science needs of every locality.

In sum, these multiple actors need to work together to learn about local climate risks, brainstorm locally-based strategies, and prioritize locally oriented implementation.

Local governments’ role can assume the role of coordinator and facilitator to make this happen.

Deliberative democracy exercises offer a tremendous opportunity to facilitate cross-sector, multiple-actor processes to develop local resiliency plans.

Deliberations harvest diverse insights by opening up non-confrontational dialogues and conversations among affected people of varying experiences and expertise.

These activities allow laymen and experts alike to actively participate in matters of public concern in a platform that promotes mutual respect.

Deliberations further the understanding of issues by creating cohorts of citizens who are knowledgeable about how they could face their common future together.

Deliberations offer the opportunity for the public to go over, consider, and prioritize solutions that they themselves can work on and contribute towards.

Deliberations facilitate greater buy-in of plans since it’s the public themselves that have crafted these plans. Deliberations, in the end, increase the efficiency of implementation.

For deliberations to be effective, nevertheless, reflective mechanisms have to be built into the process.

This kind of reflexivity allows pathways of action to be oriented, or re-oriented, along with real-time dynamics in their local settings and beyond.

In this age of climate consequences, where frequent, stronger, and weirder weather events are fast becoming the norm, the people of Southeast Asia — deemed to be among the most vulnerable — need to be transformed into deliberative locals.

As climate-resilient futures are charted in deliberative spaces, local governments have a key role to play in ensuring that deliberative exercises will lead to producing climate-resilient Southeast Asians.
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The writer is a postdoctoral associate at The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University and a Rachel Carson fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.