‘Our authorities, for one reason or another, do not have the political will to put their foot down on this matter and the consequence is an annual litany of victims bewailing lack of support.’
BEING out of town since Saturday, Sept. 24, I was watching with grave concern the progression of typhoon “Karding” as it gained strength and changed course as it neared the country. Of course, part of me was “happy” I would miss the wrath of the typhoon but my thoughts also were of my friends and kin as well as the old house in Laguna which I now am responsible for.
As fate would have it, the typhoon spared Metro Manila and Laguna from the worst of its wrath, but provinces north of Manila, including some areas of NCR, still had to go through hell and high water, a burden that is becoming more and more commonplace these days.
News coverage repeated a theme: We need more than ever to respond to climate change.
We do?
Truth to tell, we do. But in the greater scheme of things the Philippines contributes 1/2 of 1% to GHG emissions so even if we were to all stop using fossil fuel energized vehicles, ban plastics, stop eating beef and all, we will still be at the mercy of super typhoons, for two reasons. First, because the biggest GHG contributors (China, the US, the EU) still have a long way to go to make up for all the damage they’ve done to the environment during their industrializing phase — of which today’s climate change is the consequence. And second, because by the work of God our islands have been situated at a geographic location where we are almost always the landfall area of some of the world’s worst tropical disturbances. And there’s nothing we can do about where our country is located, unless we choose to move to another country!
And so, in many ways we are helpless before the onslaught of Mother Nature. And yet in a few ways there is something we can do or do better.
Here’s a basic one.
How many LGUs have actually mapped their disaster-prone areas? From storm surges to landslides to rampaging flood waters of a river, these areas should be strictly designated as off-limits to human beings, much more to becoming human settlement areas, whether of the informal or the formal kind. To let people continue to reside in such areas is to court disaster when we do not have the resources to properly respond to a disaster — or a series of disasters. Worse, people who live in danger zones put rescue workers in danger, too, and we have seen how the heroism of some people cost them their lives.
Our authorities, for one reason or another, do not have the political will to put their foot down on this matter and the consequence is an annual litany of victims bewailing lack of support.
“Karding” is a fact of life. There will be more like him. Stronger. More frequent. Less forgiving. When a “Karding” forms in the Pacific there’s little we can do to stop what happens next. But we are not helpless when it comes to that most basic precaution of putting ourselves out of harm’s way.
If only we can do that and do it well, a “Karding” will be bad but need not be a tragedy every time.
