Safeguarding World Heritage Under Recurrent Flooding: A Sustainable-Development Policy Framework for the Historic City of Ayutthaya, Thailand

Abstract

The Historic City of Ayutthaya, a UNESCO World Heritage property inscribed in 1991, was inundated by two of Thailand’s most severe floods within a fifteen-year span: the catastrophic 2011 Chao Phraya basin floods and the widespread centralThailand floods of 2025. Despite a flood-risk mitigation plan prepared after 2011 and a disaster-risk sub-plan within the site management plan, the 2025 recurrence shows that the property remains highly exposed, partly because basin-scale water management continues to route floodwater through the low-lying historic island. This paper is a policy analysis rather than an engineering study. Drawing on documented flood events, official conservation reports, and open satellite evidence, it frames heritage flood protection as a sustainable-development imperative, maps it explicitly to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.4 and related targets and to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and proposes an integrated sixpillar policy framework spanning governance mainstreaming, proactive water detention, institutionalized Earth-observation monitoring, financing and risk transfer, community and tourism resilience, and international partnership. The framework offers a transferable model for safeguarding riverine cultural heritage under intensifying, climate -driven flood risk.