I have decided to break through the urban ceiling by devoting today Sunday to stroll in the equivalent to Golden Gate Park. Here it is formed by two parks adjacent to each other: Chatuchak Park and the new Queen Sirikit Park. The latter was rededicated a year ago, on the birthday of Her Majesty, as an environmental sustainability demonstration park. I was there by 9:30 am, so I caught a good deal of the morning joggers and sport enthusiasts, which a couple of hours later were replaced by the bird watchers and the bicycle riders, and by early afternoon the young couples.
The parks are beautifully tended and have many contrasting mini-landscapes, including a couple of lakes, a meandering stream with peripheral islands, all sorts of flower beds, and a part dedicated to demonstrate irrigation and other agricultural practices.
An important feature of the park complex is a Center for Environmental Education, which in the lobby has a very interesting sets of displays about the environmental issues Bangkok is facing today. It was very interesting to me because these are the types of issues I cover in my Environmental Geology class, which meets for the first time in four days!
To start with, they acknowledge that Bangkok, with 10 million inhabitants, is short in green spaces, with an average of 5 m2 per inhabitant, when the desirable goal is 10 m2 per inhabitant. The municipal authorities are busy looking for land that can be bought and repurposed as parks, and for private partnerships to increase the number of trees and grassy spaces.
Being by the banks of a river, Bangkok has been flooded several times (five times in the last 20 years). The flood of 2011 was particularly severe and affected about 50% of the surface area of the city. The problem is that Bangkok is a coastal city, with gentle slopes that do not promote efficient surface drainage. They are also struggling with issues of subsidence because of the rapid growth of the city and groundwater extraction.
Water supply is another big issue, and they are actively pursuing water conservation programs and water recycling technologies. According to the panel, wastewater is being generated at the rate of nearly 200 liters per day per person, which puts water consumption at slightly more than that. That is a high rate taking in consideration the fact that public water use for parks is likley to be low.
Municipal solid waste is another big issue, with plastic waste being generated in huge amounts every day. They are trying to promote reduce, reuse, and recycle, as well as diverting some of the waste to waste-to-energy power plants (but landfill is still the main tool used to manage solid waste).
Energy generation is still dominated by oil-fueled plants, although the country has considerable hydroelectric resources. Transportation is still based on diesel and gasoline, although from time to time you see a Chinese electric vehicle. Air pollution issues can be significant. Traffic jams take away an hour per person every day. The metro system is somehow limited and not very cheap, with charges varying depending on the distance traveled.
Somehow depressed by the challenges that a big city faces (but inspired to get my class going in just a few days), I took another long walk through the park before coming back to my hotel to prepare for a day of travel tomorrow. I am departing at 12:30 pm from BKK to Hong Kong (a 3 hours flight), a 3 hour layover, and then a 13 hour flight from Hong Kong to SFO.
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