Climate crisis: Lessons not learned

Ten years ago, in January 2012, I wrote about the flash floods caused by the Pacific typhoon Washi (locally called “Sendong”) that swept some 1,500 people to their deaths overnight and left at least 2,000 missing in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

The months-long floods inundated not only the Philippines but also Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and most of Southeast Asia toward the end of 2011. The floods were an urgent warning that Asean governments needed to take climate change seriously. Unfortunately, they have not.

A decade later, Typhoon Rai (local name “Odette”) would thrash the country, causing widespread destruction even with only 195-kph winds as it made nine landfalls from northern Mindanao to central Philippines before it headed out to sea.

So after years of typhoons, what have we learned from these natural catastrophes? I submit the following lessons that we have, in fact, not learned:

Be proactive. It is time to bring our weather forecasting up to Western standards, where the weather alert is usually 12-14 days ahead. The Philippines and Asean weather bureaus usually wait until the weather disturbances enter the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) before raising the warning. Signal No. 2 was first raised for Rai after the weather disturbance strengthened from a severe tropical storm into a typhoon on Dec. 15. The typhoon hit the country on Christmas eve—too late.

Give immediate coordinated response. The second lesson concerns response—rescue operations and aid for the victims. This has improved greatly since I was a young man. Local governments now take pride in their disaster risk reduction teams. However, they still do not have the needed equipment and manpower—ships, helicopters, and motor boats to ferry cargo and trucks to deliver the aid by land.

They do not have the personnel especially trained and assigned for rescue operations. A climate disaster corps composed of the navy, coast guard, air force and police personnel should be trained for this as a permanent part of their assignments.

Coordinated and immediate pre-positioned aid and relief response is also crucial. Knowing where a storm is going to hit, the relief operations should be ready on the ground to mobilize immediately when disasters strike, and not days later as is the case at present.

Likewise, the response must be coordinated. A Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) study in 2020 said, “More reciprocal, cohesive local collaborations (are) needed for Philippine disaster risk reduction.” HHI surveyed “501 international and local actors across the country from 2017 to 2019. Despite having many local actors working on disaster preparedness and resilience in the Philippines, many of them were not working cohesively.” The Harvard study also asked why higher education and research institutions were not more involved, since they typically have greater access to internet and partnerships with government and international non-governmental organizations.”

Provide quality evacuation centers. A quick look at the refugee centers will tell you two things—the misery of the evacuees and the decrepit evacuation centers, with their inadequate kitchen, toilet facilities, and water supplies. We house refugees in poorly built school buildings and local gyms. Government must now build properly equipped infrastructure to withstand the storms.

Isn’t it ironic that in the midst of the storms and floods, people in the centers have no water to clean their toilets and no clean water for cooking and to drink? Anticipation would tell us to provide concrete water tanks and water purifiers in these centers. People can survive without food for days, but will die of diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera within days of an outbreak caused by dirty water and poor sanitation.

The main culprit, of course, is corruption—national and local governments build these evacuation centers with substandard materials. But since these evacuation centers will be a permanent part of the local landscape, they must be sturdy and weather-resistant and built away from coastal and flood-prone areas.

Adapt. Sound urban planning is key and should start now. Southeast Asian cities are expanding exponentially and slums are growing along sea coasts and river banks that are most vulnerable to floods. Governments must find ways to manage this urban growth.

Now is the time to build smart cities—climate-friendly cities with power lines and communication networks buried underground to avoid toppled electric poles and tangled wires that follow weather disasters. And we must move cities to higher ground.

One technology that deserves special attention in the coming rebuilding process is solar power. The Philippines has 300 days of sunshine a year and solar technology is now cheaper and available to light homes and streets. As we rebuild from this storm, think solar energy, which can now be harvested in homes, offices, and public buildings and will minimize the use of electric wires and poles.

As the Chinese say, every crisis is an opportunity. Rai, which has devastated about half of the Philippines, gives us the opportunity to build back better, safer, and wiser.

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Crispin Maslog is science columnist for SciDev.Net. A former copy editor of Agence France-Presse, he taught science journalism at Silliman University and the University of the Philippines Los Baños.