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‘The Filipino spirit is not waterproof; it is drenched in anger and sorrow for what could’ve been’
Amid back to back to back storms in the last two weeks, you may have missed that one of them, Opong, made five of its six landfalls on September 26, the 16th anniversary of Tropical Storm Ondoy.
The scenes from that fateful day are still seared in my mind. I was a Lagunense who’d just started living in a dorm in Quezon City for college. One moment, I was just writing a paper for a class, and the next, I was already helping my cousin lift a refrigerator to keep it dry from the rising floodwater. I sought shelter on higher ground and couldn’t go back to our place until the next day, so we waited the hours out watching news replete with images of chest-deep floods.
At least 464 died that day, making it one of the worst disasters to hit the Philippines.
We were not prepared that day, but it’s been 16 years — surely we should be prepared for stronger storms now, right? The Philippines, which for years has been the poster child of urgent climate action, must already have in place not just best practices in disaster risk reduction but also strategies in climate mitigation and adaptation, right?
We are a country of solutions, many of them coming from communities themselves. But as Greenpeace put it, “corruption and greed are undermining the ability of millions of Filipinos to cope with climate change.” Billions of pesos in flood control projects meant for climate adaptation (or reducing vulnerability to climate change impacts) went instead to the pockets of the corrupt, and the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves until the next storm hits.
No wonder people are angry. The Filipino spirit is not waterproof; it is drenched in anger and sorrow for what could’ve been.
As of 6 pm on September 29, at least 27 had died due to the combined effects of the habagat, Mirasol, Nando, and Opong. Twenty-seven lives lost, when one life lost is one too many. Billions of pesos were also lost in infrastructure and agricultural damage. All of that happened in the last two weeks alone.
Aksyon Klima Pilipinas national coordinator John Leo Algo was right in pointing out the absurdity of pouring so much of the country’s climate budget on just one agency, the Department of Public Works and Highways, when we could be funding the protection of our forests, watersheds, and wetlands.
Bold climate action requires an end to corruption. There is no other way forward.
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– Rappler.com
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