Background
Thailand is affected by a wide range of natural hazards including flooding, storm events/typhoons, earthquakes, landslides, tsunami, droughts and forest fires. Exposure to these hazards combined with conditions of vulnerability and insufficient capacity to cope with such shocks or stresses have resulted in disasters, which can bring about loss of lives, damage to infrastructure and widespread disruption to services, businesses and livelihoods.
Recent disasters in Thailand have proven significant in drawing attention to the need to strengthen disaster preparedness and enhance risk reduction efforts across the country. The Indian Ocean Tsunami which occurred in December 2004 severely affected a number of Thailand’s southern provinces. With this disaster still fresh in the minds of those affected, the 2nd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction was held in Kobe, Japan in January 2005 where the global community agreed upon the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) as a blueprint for disaster risk reduction (DRR ) efforts for the 2005-2015 decade.