Ordering back the tides

“Trees fail to flower,” the Aetas huddled at the Bataan mountaintop meeting told Fr. Shay Cullen. “Bees are disappearing. Storms blow away our nipa huts as never before.”

With Preda Foundation coworkers, the priest toiled up the two-hour steep trail on horseback. Preda buys the Aetas’ wild mangoes at double what lowland hawkers offer and markets them abroad.

Half a world away, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research scientists documented what the Aetas learned from the seat-of-the-pants.

University of Bern experiments span two decades, four continents and 1,634 plant species. “Spring flowering and leafing advances 5 to 6 days per year for every degree celsius of warming,” they report in the journal Nature.

The Bern tests “underestimated how much plants change,” reports British Broadcasting Corp. science reporter Matt McGarth. He adds that research leader Elizabeth Wolkovich and This Rutishauser fret over additional water needed by a plant community that sprouts a week earlier.

Contrary to myth, Filipinos have modest freshwater endowment: 6,332 cubic meters yearly. In contrast, Malaysians tap into 26,105 cubic meters. Saudi Arabians have only 118 cubic meters. They bartered more oil for water last year when Riyadh’s last aquifers ran dry.

Here, “we have a water aristocracy set on its head.” A squatter’s shack, in Cebu City, pays 13 times more for water than a gated Maria Luisa enclave home, notes the UN World Water Development Report.

In the Philippines, 54 out of every 100 lived in cities by 2007. By 2020, the number of urban Filipinos will be double that of their rural counterparts. Many cities are saddled with below-par water facilities even as births and migration interlock.

A “youth bulge” characterizes this migrant torrent, San Carlos University’s Soccoro Gultiano and East-West Center’s Peter Xenos point out. Hormones of these young migrants are on overdrive. They will tarry in the reproductive age bracket longer.

A sharper slowdown in birthrates won’t materialize anytime soon, not even if the Reproductive Health bill gets into law books. But demand for just about everything else will spiral. And there is no substitute for water.

Politically charged issues, like a chief justice’s blacked-out dollar accounts, smudge concerns, including shifting rain bands. A bachelor-president’s date will send commentators into a tizzy. But glossing over emerging threats can be lethal.

“We’re seeing changes happening… in ways we didn’t expect to see for hundreds of years,” 27 scientists, led by Oxford University’s Alex Rodgers, caution in their recent “State of  the Oceans” report to the UN.

As polluted seas warm, we enter “a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history,” they warn. Overfishing, pollution and climate change interlock “in ways not previously recognized.”

“Accelerated” changes include the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Sea levels are rising and methane, trapped in the sea bed, is seeping out.

Here “expect sea waters to rise by at least 20 centimeters in the next 40 years,” writes Dr. Wendy Clavano in a current series for Environmental Science for Social Change, a Jesuit research organization.

The severest threat stretches “along the Pacific seaboard: from Samar all the way down to eastern Mindanao.” Include the Zamboangas, and the island provinces of Romblon and Marinduque in the Sibuyan, says Clavano, a PhD holder from Cornell University.

She suggests the creation of a “vulnerability index.” This could undergird mitigation programs for what initial data pinpoint as high-risk areas. That sweeps in Lingayen Gulf (La Union and Pangasinan), Lamon Bay (Quezon and Camarines Norte), Camotes Sea (western Leyte, northern Bohol, and northeastern Cebu).

Add to that list Guimaras Strait (along northwestern Negros Occidental and Guimaras), central Sulu Sea (Cuyo Archipelago), Iligan Bay (in particular Misamis Occidental), Zamboanga del Norte, and Bislig Bay (Surigao del Sur).

Only 4 percent of coral reefs here remain in pristine condition. Other countries with equally threatened reefs are: Haiti, Grenada, Comoros, Vanuatu, Tanzania, Kiribati, Fiji and Indonesia.

Edges of the “Tropical Belt”—outer boundaries of the subtropical dry zones—have drifted toward the poles, notes Nature Geoscience. Temperature and rainfall changes alter yields, including politically volatile crops like corn and rice.

“In the Philippines, rice yields drop by 10 percent for every one degree centigrade increase in night-time temperature,” BBC’s environment correspondent Richard Black writes. As droughts dried reservoirs, yields fell by 10-20 percent over the last 25 years. More declines are ahead.

Three billion people live in the tropics and subtropics. They’ll nearly double by the end of the century. The National Statistical Coordination Board asserts there are 93 million plus of us Filipinos today. No sir, it’s 99.9 million, counter some US and international bodies.

The “most extreme summers of the last century could become routine toward the end of this century,” predicts University of Seattle. What would be summer 2100 in the Philippines be like

Filipino policymakers must move beyond politics as usual. Overdrawing on aquifers in Metro Cebu and Manila is causing severe subsidence. Clavano urges that priority be given to adaptation and mitigation approaches for sea rising levels. Like King Canute, politicians cannot order back the tides.

“Nor can we move crops north or south since many are photosensitive,” notes Dr. Geoff Hawtin at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. “(The) tipping points could come quickly.”

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