My name is Amanda Yingcharoen, and this is my response to the Norman Foster Foundation's challenge for the 2022 Sustainability Workshop in Madrid, Spain.
THE CHALLENGE:
"We want you to present us with a model, system or element of nature that might be used as an inspiration to
solve a complex human problem of your choice"
All written works and illustrations included below in this article are produced by me, Amanda Yingcharoen.
Appropriate citations are provided underneath the written works for the sources used during my research process.
THE PROBLEM
Summer is often seen as a time to relax by the poolside with a drink in hand. However, the summer of 2011 proved differently for the citizens of Thailand who found themselves sitting amidst a body of water many thousand times larger than the calming pool they bargained for.
As most of the Northern Hemisphere celebrates the latter half of summer, the months of July to October are marked by a monsoon season in Thailand. This means increased rainfall in many regions of the country, putting the public water management systems to the test. Though this season typically means growing opportunities for the agricultural industry, as rice paddies fill with water farmers begin planting their rice during this time, the 2011 monsoon season did quite the opposite.
2011’s monsoon season took away much more life than it brought. The tropical typhoon blowing over from the Phillippines caused numerous landslides throughout Thailand. Soon, floods spread along the country’s biggest rivers, the Chao Phraya and Mekong, affecting the Northern, Northeastern, and Central regions of Thailand. 65 out of the 76 provinces in Thailand were declared flood disaster areas, with the overwhelming rainfall damaging over 20,000 square kilometers of farmland there.
The agricultural industry was not the only one that took a hit by this disaster. Countless factories were faced with water levels as high as three meters, dwarfing much of the machinery and equipment housed there as well as damaging their stockpile of manufactured goods. The ramifications of this were felt by a global shortage of hard disk drives that persisted well into 2012.
With many large-scale industries being forced to shut down for nearly half a year, many people became unemployed. Not to mention their houses were flooded and they were in dire need of food supplies that could not be delivered, nonetheless produced, due to the aforementioned flooded farmlands. Overall, the flood caused a total of 815 deaths and affected over 13.6 million people across the country. The world bank estimated that 1,425 trillion baht (46.5 billion USD) worth of economic damage was incurred, ranking this as the fourth most expensive disaster as of 2011.
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The map above shows the regions in Thailand that were affected by the flood, varying in severity from least (yellow), moderate (red), to most dangerous (dark gray). The biggest rivers running through the country are marked by blue lines.
Though this period over a decade ago marked the worst flood in the history of the country, Thailand has continually faced smaller floods in the subsequent years following this disaster. What was once considered an event that can only happen once in a century, will start to occur more and more often as extreme weather patterns are exacerbated by the accelerated rate of climate change the world currently faces. Nearly every monsoon season, larger cities such as Bangkok and Chiang Mai regularly face floods in areas where water management systems struggle to keep up with the rapid urbanization. Rural areas are affected by heavy rainfall as well, as many flash floods occur in mountains in the Northern region of the country, and fishing communities living in floodplains or dams frequently face the threat of increased water levels or extreme storms possibly tearing their settlements apart.
THE SOLUTION
Enter the Physarum polycephalum, also affectionately nicknamed “the blob” by members of the scientific community. P. polycephalum is a macroscopic single-celled fungus that grows large enough to be observable by the naked human eye.
In 2010, “the blob” was put to the test by Japanese scientist Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his team, who conducted a study in which they placed bits of oats, a food source for the fungus, on a small-scale map of Tokyo in the locations of towns surrounding the city. Then a slime mold cell was placed on the map, expected to solve the conundrum of building a route for a subway system that connects Tokyo to its larger municipal area.
When faced with multiple food sources, the fungus engulfs each piece of food and creates tunnels to redistribute the nutrients gained to the rest of the cell. After some rounds of trial and error, “the blob” began to find its way around mini-Tokyo and the minuscule tendrils it forms to reach out to each cluster of oats soon consolidate into larger branches that travel more efficiently across the map. Smaller, less used tubes disappeared, replaced by bigger pathways that transport nutrients via more effective routes.
The animation shows the growth of the P. Polycephalum as it slowly starts to resemble the Tokyo subway plan.
Once the fungus settled fully into the map, the paths formed resembled much of the existing Tokyo subway system, despite the former being created by a brainless single-celled organism while the latter was carefully designed by a large team of experienced engineers. Could “the blob” possibly provide a solution to Thailand’s recurring flood problem as well?
One of the biggest issues with Thailand’s mismanagement of its water pathways is the lack of long-term, large-scale planning. Many water management structures were developed by smaller municipal areas, but these mechanisms do not mesh together into a larger nationwide system. Furthermore, it would require a lot of time and money for the government to hire enough engineers to re-route all the pre-existing inefficient waterways. Hence, the P. polycephalum can provide a consistent yet cost-effective solution to the problem.
In order to plan water management systems within cities experiencing rapid growth, future developments would have to be taken into consideration, a factor that is currently not being addressed by the government. In order to apply Nakagaki’s experiment to the scale of a Thai city such as Bangkok and its widespread municipal area, a different approach has to be taken. Since Thailand’s main concern is inadequate water management, the location of the oat clusters will be marked by areas that experience more intense rainfall during the monsoon season and regions of lower elevation. With smaller-scale floods occurring nearly every year, sufficient data is available regarding which areas of Bangkok’s municipalities are considered flood-prone.
To take it a step further, based on the aforementioned factors, regions that will be incorporated into Bangkok’s urban sprawl in the future should also be taken into consideration, even if they are not densely populated yet presently. New sewage systems can be dug along the routes formed by the P. polycephalum, making transportation of wastewater more efficient and cost-effective.
A similar strategy can be taken in more rural areas as well. Places that experience heavy rainfall must be connected to dams or reservoirs, while these water collection points must have efficient irrigation systems that can discharge the water into farmlands when needed. Each of these points can be marked with oats for the P. polycephalum to navigate itself with, mapping an efficient route for a more spread-out system in contrast to the urban one previously discussed.
CONCLUSION
Although water mismanagement is a complex issue that has plagued Thailand for over a decade, its solution can be as simple as a single-celled organism. It should be noted that nationwide water systems cannot be re-routed based solely on a few experiments with fungi. However, studying the unique decision-making capabilities of “the blob” can be a significant first step toward re-designing Thailand’s waterways so they could withstand the progressive escalation of extreme weather patterns well into the future.
SOURCES
Moseman, Andrew. 2010. “Brainless Slime Mold Builds a Replica Tokyo Subway.” Discover Magazine. Discover Magazine. January
22, 2010. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/brainless-slime-mold-builds-a-replica-tokyo-subway.
Patrick. 2021. “The Challenge of Water Management in Thailand - Policy Forum.” Policy Forum. September 28, 2021.
https://www.policyforum.net/the-challenge-of-water-management-in-
thailand/#:~:text=Water%20management%20challenges%20in%20Thailand,consequences%20of%20a%20changing%
20climate..
“Thailand’s ‘Worst’ Floods Leave 224 Dead.” 2022. Google News. 2022.
pil21zfBlurqoVHw?docId=CNG.6185d845b10c9bd3444cb7c3c9426b41.821.
“The World Bank Supports Thailand’s Post-Floods Recovery Effort.” 2012. Archive.org. 2012.
post-floods-recovery-effort.