This is in response to your July 18 editorial, “The floods next time,” which reacts with great alarm to an Asian Development Bank report that four coastal Metro Manila cities as well as Butuan, Davao and Iloilo are threatened by drowning from sea-level rise caused by global warming.
Why do Filipino opinion makers respond only to pronouncements from foreign entities and continue to ignore good science from Filipinos?
Dr. Fernando Siringan, now the director of the Marine Science Institute at UP Diliman, is an internationally respected expert on sea-level rise. In 2006, he and I published in the international journal “Disasters” a paper titled “Global sea-level rise is recognized, but flooding from anthropogenic land subsidence is ignored around northern Manila Bay, Philippines.” That article reported that our local apparent sea-level rise, caused by excessive extraction of groundwater, is more than 10 times faster than sea-level rise from global warming.
More recently, our findings have been corroborated and more precisely defined, using satellite-borne data, at the National Institute of Geological Sciences at UP Diliman.
In other words, the problem for us is much greater than reported by the ADB! Our research is widely recognized abroad, but we are prophets ignored in our own country.
The Department of Public Works and Highways knows about this phenomenon but, conniving with the Japan International Cooperation Agency, deliberately ignores it as it continues to expend great amounts of national wealth on useless flood-control projects.
President Duterte as well as the citizens of his Davao City, and of Butuan, Iloilo, and many other Philippine coastal cities, need to know that these communities may be facing similar subsidence, and their problems may be worse, simply because no one has even begun to study the degree to which they may be subsiding from excessive groundwater use.
KELVIN S. RODOLFO, PhD, professor emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, and senior research fellow, Manila Observatory