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The study aims to provide a clear picture of Bangkok’s Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, starting by understanding the magnitude of heat and its locations. Extreme urban heat is becoming an urgent challenge for Bangkok, threatening lives, livelihoods, and the city’s economic resilience. The UHI effect exacerbates this crisis, turning built-up areas into heat traps that contribute to heat-related mortality, lost productivity, higher energy consumption, and other negative outcomes.

Although the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration has initiated measures such as its Heat Action Plan, heat-level-based alerts, and greening projects, there remain critical improvement potentials in coverage, cooling resources, and long-term policy commitments. By applying a people (vulnerable groups), places (high-risk areas), and institutions (who coordinate urban heat management) framework, the report suggests:

• Short-term interventions, such as more inclusive heat alerts or systematically opening cooling centers and hydration points in more public locations, could make an immediate difference.
• Long-term policy solutions are also important for setting Bangkok on a path toward greater heat resilience; these could include green and blue infrastructure expansion, as well as integrating climate considerations into urban planning, zoning, transportation, building codes, and public health systems.
• Tackling urban heat requires sustained governance, funding, and multi-sector collaboration. Decision-makers could consider creating a dedicated heat task force to unify different departments, tackle overlapping mandates, work across sectors, and develop robust funding mechanisms (e.g., a dedicated heat resilience fund) to ensure continuity in urban heat reduction initiatives across different administrations.