HAVE you experienced a major natural disaster and lived to share about it? I did in 2015.
I was invited by the International Centre for Mountain Development in Nepal a few months after my trip to Tajikistan, a former Soviet Republic, and became independent when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke up.
For a time, I was a rock star of sorts as sustainable mountain development colleagues peppered me with questions of the experience of living through hell and lived to tell about it.
Super Typhoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan) has made a mark as one of the planet's most catastrophic storms. The winds of the super typhoon brought monster winds and giant waves that left a massive trail of death and destruction in various parts of the country. I thank God for being in Bacolod. We used to know Storm Signal 3.
Yolanda broke the charts with category 5, hitherto unknown in the Philippine experience. Mount Kanlaon and the mountain ranges of Mount Mandalagan serve as our buffer zone against storm surges. Even the mountain ranges of the nearby island Panay serve the same purpose.
Back in 2017, I wrote for SunStar Bacolod that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Mountain Partnership are active participants. The FAO headquarters based in Rome has instructed its Philippine office to prioritize the Negros event. It sent Dr. Eulito U. Bautista to set aside his other schedules so that the FAO and the MP will have a face in the five-day event.
I represented the Broad Initiatives for Negros Development (BIND), a member since the MP founding in 2003. Then there’s the Non-Timber Forest Product-Exchange Programme. This kind of cooperation is what the UN classifies as “Type Two” outcomes which are “partnerships of the willing” among various countries and government and private and civil society stakeholders.
Such partnerships were forged outside the formal negotiation process of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. The message from FAO’s Dr. Bautista on the Green Economy and Sustainable Mountain Development is equally important as the mere fact of FAO’s presence during the first day.
I was happy to note that the largely indigenous people who listened to the presentation were active listeners. It shows that, before, their awareness was limited to their communities. Now they have expanded their knowledge to that of climate change, the scourge that affects all of us.
Droughts, flash floods, mudslides, and even storm surges are becoming personal concerns. Climate change expert Dr. Esteban C. Godilano drove home this point. Almost everyone listened in as Dr. Gordillano warned that Negros Occidental ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. The bad news is that there is no safe place against multiple hazards, that the safest place against storm surges in Bacolod City can be found in its elevated places like Barangays Alangilan and Granada.
As for those in most other Bacolod communities, he warned that we can run but we cannot escape the fury of a Yolanda megastorm. Everyone looked at each other, like who will get a bullet from a game of Russian roulette. With climate change getting worse, it's now a race for time to arrest worsening global warming.*