In 2025, Chiang Mai University informed and supported local and regional government in early warning and monitoring of local climate change disasters and risks, as part of its work towards Sustainable Development Goal 13 (Climate Action). The two main risks are floods in the rainy season and smoke haze in the dry season.
Flood early warning and monitoring for Chiang Mai Province. CMU links several units into one warning chain that serves the province, as the university reported on 7 October 2025:
The academic Center for Water Management Support produces the Flood Hazard Map that Chiang Mai Province uses to plan and set protection priorities.
CM Flood Poles and painted flood marks in the city show residents the risk level at a glance.
Floodboy, an automatic water-level gauge developed CMU, uses AI to monitor rising water and send early alerts to agencies and communities.
The Climate Change Data Center (CCDC) and the Office of Academic Service (UNISERV) built U-LIB, a LINE bot that relays every warning issued by the province’s Joint Information Center (JIC) from the Governor’s war room, and keeps a searchable record of them.
Residents report incidents through the PODD system (LINE@podd-report), which forwards each report to the responsible local government organisation.
CMU’s Natural Disaster Management Research Center works with Chiang Mai Province and its agencies on prevention measures and emergency action plans, so the monitoring tools and the government’s response are planned together.
Haze monitoring for the upper northern provinces. The Northern Haze Academic Working Group (AcAir CMU), chaired by Assoc. Prof. Dr.Somporn Chantara, gives provincial governments the data they need to warn the public about smoke haze. Its tools include the public LINE account Air Quality by CMU (@aircmu), reference-grade monitoring stations, AI-guided drones that detect forest fires, a PM2.5 big-data platform, the “Fireman” command system, and FireD for managing biomass burning.AcAir has built a baseline database of hotspots and PM2.5 for nine upper northern provinces. CCDC publishes real-time PM2.5, hotspot, and water-level data, and on 30 June 2025 it joined the Chiang Mai Provincial Office of Natural Resources and Environment’s lessons-learned workshop on the 2025 fire season.
Health early warning linked to haze and weather. The Faculty of Public Health, led by Emeritus Prof.Dr.Suwat Chaiyalertsak, runs a real-time surveillance system for haze- and weather-related illness. Phase 1, for Chiang Mai, has been used by provincial health agencies since early 2024 and shows weekly patient numbers for COPD, pneumonia, asthma, bronchitis, influenza, and stroke, so the province can warn the public on high-PM2.5 days and plan beds, staff, and medicine.NRCT funds the project.