Editorial: Adaptation urgent

Sunday, December 18, 2011

LIKE a broken record or a pirated disc, we review similar scenes of rivers overflowing their banks and drowning residents. It happened during Ondoy but the mud-caked cadavers that are now pushing Search and Rescue workers to their limits are most reminiscent of a long-ago incident -- the flooding in Ormoc City in 1991 when thousands died, drowned by rampaging riverwaters in the deep of the night.

We are not a stranger to such disaster. We had our share just last January. 

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That these are happening more often than we have ever experienced it in history underscores the immediate need for both local government units and the people to craft adaptation measures fast. Amid the unpredictability of climate change, climate change mitigating and adaptation measures have long been campaigned for. But the Philippines, which tops the list among the world’s most visited by natural hazards, see so slow in picking up the mitigation part. No effort is being exerted to rehabilitate forests as carbon traps; instead, government is even selling off hectares upon hectares of green mountains to mining companies who are so eager to dig up every last ore they can get their hands on. Mitigation, however, requires working with the land’s biodiversity. The way our country is being run, we would all be dead -- drowned by rampaging floodwaters or buried by landslides -- and still no mitigation measure that really works can ever be set in place. We thus have to focus on adaptation. 

How would our people be better able to live through the natural hazards of flashfloods, landslides, and sea level rise? How would the people embark on these, step by step? Who will teach these to them in a sustained method? Is it time to integrate all these in the school curriculum in the same way we were taught how to cross the street when we were in the primary years? 

Isn’t it time now for people to sit down and seriously discuss all these to come up with clear directions and actions? 

All these have to already been embarked on because all that has been happening around us is telling us one thing: Never can we underestimate the disaster nature can throw our way and the blame-game accomplishes nothing.