With recent typhoons battering the area and Manila being named the
second most vulnerable city to climate change, risk reduction is the key.
Almost a year after Typhoon
“Sendong” devastated the cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan in the northern
part of Mindanao, Philippines in December 2011, the historically “typhoon-free”
island experienced another similarly rare and intense tropical storm that
struck earlier this month. Super Typhoon “Pablo” slammed into Siquijor, Misamis
Oriental, Surigao del Sur, Agusan del Sur, Compostela Valley, and Davao
Oriental, hitting some of the same cities and towns still recovering from the
havoc suffered during Sendong.
According to the Philippines
Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA),
Pablo was 375 miles in diameter and packed gusts up to 130 mph with torrential
rains that averaged one inch per hour. Likewise, when Sendong made landfall, it
dumped more than a month’s worth of average rainfall in just 12 hours, sparking
flash floods in the middle of the night and trapping hundreds of thousands of
residents. In relation to 40 years of meteorological records, Mindanao has not
experienced such storms, heavy rainfall, and landslides since Typhoon Titang
hit back in 1970.
According to the National
Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC), as of December 18th,
the death toll from Pablo had reached 1,046 people with 841 still missing, with
agriculture damages likely to reach $398 million, infrastructure damage
equaling $190.4 million, and private property losses of $1.2 million. The same
source later said the death toll was likely to top 1,500 people killed.
Some blame the high death toll
and Mindanao’s extreme vulnerability to such strong storms, floods, and
landslides on the unabated illegal logging and mining operations in the area.
However, there isn’t much scientific evidence from past flood tragedies to
confirm this theory. The Society of Filipino Foresters issued a statement
earlier this year referencing past typhoons Ondoy (2009) and Sendong (2011) and
recognizing the fact that “forests can help minimize but cannot totally prevent
the occurrence of floods,” and that massive floods are more a result of weak
infrastructure and the ever increasing amount of moisture in the atmosphere.
Although deforestation and
environmental degradation play a role in amplifying the destruction that occurs
during such extreme weather events, climate change is a greater factor in
determining the severity of flooding than the cut logs and debris that clog
waterways and lead to overflowing river banks. In the same sense, weak disaster
preparedness and disaster risk management plans are also partly to blame for
the large number of lives lost in natural disasters and for continuing to allow
populations to live in geo-hazardous areas.
As The Asia Foundation’s country
representative in the Philippines, Steven Rood, further explains: “The only
time I saw a serious examination of the issue of illegal logging and mining
causing more severe floods was more than a decade ago with respect to Ormoc
City and the Typhoon Uring flooding tragedy that happened down in the Visayas
in 1991 (in a JICA-funded flood mitigation control study). The data were clear
— there was simply too much rain for any ecosystem to absorb, and too many
people living along the river banks in danger zones. That there were logs
washed down is undeniable, but this had nothing to do with the extent of the
flood and little to do with the damages.”
According to IPCC, as average
global temperatures rise, the warmer atmosphere can also hold more moisture,
about 4 percent more per degree Fahrenheit temperature increase. The
atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per
square meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988. A warmer atmosphere leads to more
evaporation of ocean water, meaning that each tropical storm that forms has
more potential water to pull from and therefore drench in its wake. The
citizens of the communities in southern Mindanao, especially along the coastal
towns of Compostela Valley and Davao de Sur provinces who were the first to be
hit by Pablo, had never before experienced that kind of typhoon.
Storms are becoming stronger,
weather patterns are changing, and, frighteningly, this is becoming the “new
normal.” Given the fact that Manila was
recently rated the second most vulnerable city in the world to climate change
for 2013 (only behind Dhaka, Bangladesh), more attention is being given to
building up the resiliency of communities to withstand such extreme weather
events in the future. In the aftermath of Typhoon Ondoy in 2009, both local and
international NGOs began lobbying for a national disaster management plan,
which was eventually passed the following year and known as the Philippine
Disaster Risk Reduction Management Act of 2010. The new law illustrates a shift
in the response of local authorities toward disaster risk reduction, rather
than solely relying on response and relief.
Technical assistance is
available, such as AusAID’s support to an aerial survey of metro Manila to
generate a three-dimensional, geo-hazard map of the metropolis. In 2012,
USAID/OFDA provided over $4.1 million for disaster risk reduction activities,
mainly in the areas of food security and efforts to strengthen local
humanitarian coordination in the Philippines. These kinds of climate change
adaptation strategies are working. After Pablo, engineer Armen A Cuenca, the
deputy in charge of Cagayan de Oro’s disaster risk reduction management office,
said that “early warning alert systems and pre-planned shelters this year were
one of the reasons there were zero casualties in the city, which has a
population of around 700,000.”
Preparedness remains the key to resilience.
Kourtnii S. Brown
Business & Investment Opportunities
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