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November 2025 has been a cruel month for Southeast Asia. But nowhere is the silence of the submerged quite as
As central Việt Nam reeled under devastating floods, the public was troubled not just by the scale of destruction, but
November 2025 has been a cruel month for Southeast Asia. But nowhere is the silence of the submerged quite as deafening as it is in Việt Nam. While the skies opened and unleashed hell across the region, the situation in the country offers a particularly grim case study of "environmental authoritarianism.”
As of late November, torrential downpours and landslides have claimed at least 98 lives with dozens more missing in Central Việt Nam, inundating over 300,000 homes. The coffee harvest—a lifeline for the economy—is rotting in the fields, ensuring that economic pain will persist long after the waters recede.
However, the real tragedy encompasses more than just the volume of rain. Việt Nam runs under a governance model that prefers concrete dikes to community input and treats disaster data like a state secret.
The Vietnamese government’s response has been characteristically top-down and technocratic, managed by an "environmental elite" that excludes the very people treading water in their living rooms. When citizens took to social media to question the official death tolls or criticize the slow response, the state fined them for spreading "false information."
While Việt Nam attempts to drown out dissent along with its floodwaters, its neighbors are faring no better. To the west, Thailand’s bureaucracy is choking on its own fragmentation, and to the east, the Philippines is embroiled in a corruption scandal so brazen it has sent hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to protest. Across the region, the waters are rising, but it is the weight of incompetence, corruption, and authoritarian hubris that is truly dragging these nations under.
In November 2025, Thailand saw at least 176 fatalities as massive floods devastated at least nine provinces. The city of Hat Yai, a southern economic hub, was battered by 13 inches of rain in a single day—a "300-year" event that turned streets into rivers and cut off maternity wards, leaving newborns stranded.
The immediate effects were catastrophic: 1.4 million households were affected, hospital patients were airlifted from rooftops, and the economic toll is likely to shred 1% of the country’s GDP. Yet, the fallout reveals a disaster management system that is, to put it bluntly, broken. Thailand’s flood response is split among 48 agencies across 13 ministries. With everyone in charge, no one is in charge. Orders overlap and command centers issue conflicting directives, resulting in an operational disaster where efficiency goes to die.
This is more than an administrative failure. Thailand’s guilt lies in its technological negligence. Nearly half of the country’s weather monitoring equipment fails to function consistently, with flood forecasts only 33% accurate a day in advance of a storm while warnings simply fail to reach residents. In a modern state with the ambition of being a regional leader, this level of unpreparedness is inexcusable.
While the government spends the bulk of its budget on building physical dams and drainage systems—tangible projects that look good in photos—it allocates extremely little to the data systems that actually save lives. The reaction from on the ground has been one of desperation and anger, with citizens forced to rely on charity and their own resilience because the 48 government agencies could not even manage to send a timely SMS.
Two back-to-back typhoons in November 2025, Kalmaegi and Fung-wong, pummeled the Philippine Archipelago, killing over 200 people and displacing millions.
The Philippines is currently convulsing under the weight of a "flood-control fiasco." The government has allocated over 500 billion pesos ($8.5 billion) for flood control projects, yet the country remains the most disaster-prone on earth. These funds disappeared into the pockets of favored contractors and politicians. Additional investigations have unearthed over 400 "ghost projects"—infrastructure that was reported as completed but simply never built.
In response, an estimated 650,000 people flooded Rizal Park in Manila—a rare display of unity—wearing white and demanding accountability for the billions lost to infrastructures of impunity. It has been revealed that up to 70% of flood control funds may have been lost to corruption. Disaster mitigation in the Philippines has become a pork barrel scam, where the suffering of the poor is monetized by the political elite.
Connecting these three nations is their reliance on hydropower dams, often touted as engines of modernity.
In Việt Nam, during the recent storms, operators prioritized the structural integrity of the dam over the safety of the people below. In Phú Yên, floodgates were opened with no prior warning to save the reservoir, unleashing a wall of water on unsuspecting residents.
In Thailand, the Bhumibol Dam neared capacity in late 2025, forcing authorities into a panic. They had to increase discharge rates into the Chao Phraya River, threatening Bangkok and other downstream provinces. The dams, intended to regulate flow, often exacerbate the crisis because operators wait too long to release water, fearing dry season shortages, only to dump massive volumes when the dams threaten to burst.
The situation in Thailand is compounded because the specific direction in which this excess water is drained is also a sensitive political matter. Politicians frequently intervene to ensure that water is diverted away from their own constituents. In response, local communities are forced to protest and even sabotage flood walls to save their own homes from the diverted deluge.
The Philippines faces the same issue in Bulacan, where the Angat, Ipo, and Bustos dams release water during heavy rains to prevent overflow. The water then flows directly toward low-lying towns, effectively drowning communities to save infrastructure.
Hydropower dams are essential for electricity and irrigation in modern life. However, the issue lies in faulty governance. For instance, the relentless construction of dams in the Mekong Basin has trapped sediment, starving the delta and causing it to sink faster than the sea is rising.
The environmental cost is a potential 41% drop in fisheries biomass and the erosion of the very land these nations stand on. Short-sighted governance that prioritizes immediate energy gains and construction contracts over the long-term survival of the ecosystem and the safety of the population guarantees that the very development these dams promise will be washed away by the environmental collapse they will inevitably cause.
Geography sets the stage for the water, but the script for the ensuing disaster is written entirely by the failures of Bangkok, Manila, and Hà Nội.
Việt Nam’s government operates with a "bamboo-style" censorship that is as flexible as it is repressive. The state maintains a monopoly on disaster relief through the Fatherland Front, sidelining independent NGOs and treating disaster response as a tool for political legitimacy. Even the leadership selection is now a "top secret" affair, further insulating the elite from public accountability.
When floods hit, Hà Nội’s priority is controlling the narrative. Social media users are fined for posting "unverified" death tolls that contradict state media, creating a crisis of trust where the public no longer believes the government even when it might be telling the truth. This environmental authoritarianism ensures that—without public criticism—the technocrats will continue to build concrete structures that fail.
Thailand’s lack of centralized cohesion and political grandstanding means that local governors lack the authority to coordinate agencies in their own provinces. Investment goes into construction projects—likely because they offer better kickback opportunities than software systems—while early warning systems remain inefficient and inaccurate.
However, the Thai bureaucracy is so fragmented that during the crisis, multiple command centers issued conflicting orders, leaving first responders confused and paralyzed.
The Philippines is—perhaps—the worst. Governance is indistinguishable from organized crime, and flagrant corruption is an open secret. The "rigged system" of infrastructure bidding ensures that flood control is merely a pretext for plunder.
The budget has ballooned, yet the country remains defenseless. This is malice and cruelty in its purest form; the political elite have institutionalized a system where ghost projects are paid for with public funds, and the cost of doing business is the lives of the poor who are washed away when the imaginary seawalls fail to hold back the tide.
In all three nations, the dams and dikes are props in a theater of governance failure. Whether it is the authoritarian suppression of data in Việt Nam, the bureaucratic paralysis in Thailand, or the kleptocracy in the Philippines, the result is the same: the infrastructure meant to save lives is either nonexistent, mismanaged, or actively weaponized against the population.
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