Geohazard

Even as we buckle down to survive Typhoon Pepeng, coming as it does so quickly after Ondoy, we need to contemplate the requirements of public safety into the long future.

The population of Luzon, exhausted by the frantic rescue and relief efforts of the past week, must now prepare to deal with yet another potentially disastrous typhoon. There will be much to be done over the next few days and weeks.

Severe weather disturbances have, of course, happened in the past. But the severity has evidently stepped up as a consequence, our scientists say, by the onset of climate change. The awesome volume of rain dropped by Ondoy on us is due, they say, to the warming of the waters of central Philippines.

Global warming is not something that will take its toll further on the horizon. Every fraction of a centigrade increase in average temperatures causes dramatic alterations in weather patterns.

Global warming is not something that will come. It is a condition that is already upon us.

We must either confront its dramatic effects with some sense of urgency or suffer its truly dramatic consequences. Whatever we need to do, we have to do now. We have to muster the consensus of our communities and create the political will to develop an adequate response. Or else we make rescue and relief the hallmarks of our lives.

For years, Sen. Loren Legarda has been a consistent voice warning about the imminent effects of climate change. But hers has been something akin to a voice in the wilderness. Our political and institutional establishments give her warnings a polite nod and then go on business-as-usual.

Legarda has asked the agencies concerned to produce detailed geohazard maps to precisely identify communities at risk, clear the floodways of informal settlers, do massive reforestation, fully enforce the Building Code and draw up a truly comprehensive disaster mitigation plan. None of these have been done.

In this country, business-as-usual means taking things easy, tolerating minor infractions of the rules, avoiding antagonizing politically influential communities and thinking short-term. The sum of all these is that murderous flood we saw last Saturday.

I am sure Loren must have wept in pure exasperation. Few took heed and bothered to do the extraordinary things required to make our communities safe.

Those extraordinary things require true grit. It demands that local executives come down hard on property developers who have built subdivisions on flood plains and encroached on river banks. It demands that mayors ruthlessly clear informal settlers who inhabit river banks at great risk. It demands extreme leadership in building the floodways that have been on the drawing boards for decades.

Last week’s floods tell us one thing: the metropolitan area is long on population and short on proper planning. The floods tell us our politicians have said too much and done too little.

The calamity is the sum of all our mistakes.

Provident Village, for instance, should not even be there in the first place. It sits on a floodplain, right on the path of onrushing currents. The fact that it is there is testimony to the weak state we have endured: poor regulatory frameworks, populist policy-making, corruption and political accommodation.

The archipelago we inhabit is imperiled as it is. Its island ecology is vulnerable. The islands sit on the path of typhoons. We are heir to the whims of the monsoon rains. Our waterways are small and easily interrupted by careless human activity. Our hillsides are prone to slides under heavy rainfall. Our population has long exceeded the carrying capacity of this archipelago.

We should have long ago compensated for that imperiled condition with tougher regulation and better planning. We did not, obviously.

To this day, our Congress has not yet enacted a Land Use Plan that will tightly regulate settlements and conserve surviving forested areas. If such a plan is ever passed, it should call for the demolition of all structures encroaching on waterways and ban settlement on floodplains. That will have to be truly draconian.

We should plan to build upwards, not sideways. We need to confront the scarcity of land in relation to our present population size. There should be limits to urban sprawl because that sprawl leads to settlement of hazardous areas.

We should arrive at a clear policy regarding commercial forestry. People will not care for the forests if they do not derive economic benefits from them.

We should charge people for the volume of waste they produce and hang on sight people who dispose of their wastes into the waterways. Look at the trash left behind on river banks. The chaos that is our solid waste disposal system must finally be dealt with firmly and uncompromisingly.

A long list could be drawn here. But what is important is to begin doing things right for a change. That will require strong political will and we must find that soon.

To begin with, none of the riverbank communities washed away by the floods should be allowed to return. The great community effort at providing relief to the devastated settlements must eventually transform into a community effort to correct what went wrong. The various volunteer groups must be made to take charge of specific communities for the longer term, not to rescue them all over again but to ensure that none are allowed back into hazardous zones.

We need to be focused on this. Global warming will bring even more severe weather disturbances down the road.