Text and Photos by Henrylito D. Tacio
In the past, Mindanao was considered typhoon-free but today cyclones no longer spare the country’s second largest island. This was particularly true in Davao Region, whose inhabitants never experience typhoons in their lives. Not until Super Typhoon Pablo (international name: Washi) made landfall late on December 3, 2012. The storm caused widespread destruction in the region.
Pablo packed winds of up to 175 miles per hour when it hit the region, bringing severe rains that crushed entire barangays, rendering thousands homeless, as well as destroying roads and bridges.
“Electrical poles snapped like matchsticks as Pablo’s devastating winds howled across the island of Mindanao, leaving large swaths of territory without power. It was the strongest weather disturbance to hit the south in two decades,” a government official was quoted as saying.
Arthur Uy, then governor of the worst-hit province, Compostela Valley, reported that furious water and sticky mud from the uplands had swept through school buildings, covered courts, town halls, and health centers where residents had taken shelter. “The waters came so suddenly and unexpectedly, and the winds were so fierce; that compounded the loss of lives and livelihood,” the government official told Reuters in a telephone interview.
A year earlier, in 2011, Mindanao was also hit by another strong typhoon named Sendong (international name: Washi). On December 16, severe tropical storm Sendong brought 10 hours of excessive rains that generated disastrous flash flooding over Mindanao, an area that rarely experiences tropical cyclones.
More than 200 millimeters of rain decanted in some places as rivers were already swollen. As darkness engulfed the night, hundreds of people were killed by the rushing flood waters. Landslides demolished homes along mountain sides. In some locations, flood waters rose by 3.3 meters in less than an hour. Residents affected by these flood waters had to go to the rooftops to seek refuge.
“It’s the worst flood in the history of our city,” Lawrence Cruz, then the mayor of Iligan, was quoted as saying. “It happened so fast, at a time when people were asleep.”
The country’s regular cyclone paths cover Mindoro, Marinduque, Bicol, Panay, Samar, and Leyte. Typhoons used to be moderate in Northern Luzon and Batanes, but it has completely changed as typhoons now frequent these areas.
Are these super typhoons manifestations of global warming – or is it climate change?
“Climate change is a better choice than the term global warming because it avoids the misleading implications: that all parts of the world are warming uniformly and that the only dangerous outcome of growing greenhouse gas emissions is higher temperatures,” clarified Dr. Rosa T. Perez, a research fellow of the Manila Observatory.
“Warming is only the tipping point for a cascade of changes in the earth’s ecosystems,” she explained. “In addition, climate change better conveys the coexistence of human-made effects with natural climate variability, a more accurate, ‘state-of-the-science’ portrayal of the causes for the phenomenon.”
It was Dr. James E. Hansen of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration who first raised the problem of climate change. In 1988, he told an American Senate hearing that the greenhouse effect “is changing our climate now.”
The greenhouse effect is a natural warming process. According to Dr. Perez, carbon dioxide and certain other gases are always present in the atmosphere. These gases create a warming effect that has some similarity to the warming inside a greenhouse, hence the name “greenhouse effect.”
Here’s what happens: “Visible sunlight passes through the atmosphere without being absorbed; some are back-scattered. Some of the sunlight striking the earth is absorbed and converted to heat, which warms the surface. The surface emits heat to the atmosphere, where some of it is absorbed by greenhouse gases and re-emitted toward the surface. Some of the heat is not trapped by greenhouse gases and escapes into space.”
Dr. Perez says that human activities that emit additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere increase the amount of heat that gets absorbed before escaping to space, thus enhancing the greenhouse effect and amplifying the warming of the earth.
“Although the Earth’s climate has changed many times throughout its history, the rapid warming seen today cannot be explained by natural processes alone,” pointed out Dr. Perez, who has a PhD in Meteorology from the University of the Philippines.
“Climate change is very simple,” noted Dr. Robert Watson, one of the world’s leading climate scientists. “We are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases and thus their concentrations in the atmosphere are going up. As these concentrations increase, the temperature of the earth rises.”
Examples of greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. There are also those man-made gases generated during industrial processes like sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, and perfluorocarbons.
“Our lifestyle has led to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” notes the fact sheet circulated during a climate change workshop in Davao City. “These gases trap heat from the sun, making the earth warmer. Manifestations of a warmer world include rising mean temperatures, sea level rise and increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like droughts and greater rainfall.”
“A continuing rise in average global sea level would inundate parts of many heavily populated river deltas and the cities on them, making them uninhabitable, and would destroy many beaches around the world,” said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of 2,000 scientists which advises the United Nations.
But despite this fact, there are still dissenters. “I do not know that there are so many who don’t believe in climate change,” Dr. Lourdes Tibig told a group of environmental journalists during a media briefing. “They say this climate change we are talking about is a hoax. Because they say the climate has been changing through the millennia.”
That’s true, said Dr. Tibig, a meteorologist and climatologist and a member of the Climate Change Commission’s National Panel of Technical Experts. “Climate has been changing since the start up to now because of natural causes such as changes in the sun’s intensity, earth’s change in orbit as it revolves around the sun.”
The highlights of the most recent IPCC assessment reports have already ended. “We finished the assessment in 2023,” Dr. Tibig said. “With the publication of the synthesis report, the most important highlights of those findings are one human influence warming the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years.”
The analysis of the country’s climate scientists showed that from 1950 “there has been a slight increase in temperatures, becoming faster as we approach the year 2000.” In 2016, the most recent assessment, it was found that the “temperature increase for the whole globe has reached the point of 1.1 degrees Centigrade.”
It goes without saying that the Philippines is in a precarious position. “We have an average of 20 tropical cyclones within the Philippine Area of Responsibility,” Dr. Tibig reminded. “And with the rainfall associated with tropical cyclones, it almost always leads to river floods. It has already been shown that these events can reduce economic growth of affected countries for more than a decade.”
She cited what happened during the period from 1971 to 2014. She said that across all affected countries, the growth losses from severe tropical cyclones and river floods may have accumulated to 6.5% and 5.0%, respectively, over 15 years.
“That is from 1971 to 2014. I would expect that the data, the statistics from the years 2050 to current, when you’re talking of impacts in terms of impacts of tropical cyclones and river floods, it would be much worse than this,” Dr. Tibig reiterated.
As an archipelago, the Philippines has about 7,641 islands. Only about 2,000 islands are inhabited, and more than 5,000 are yet to be officially named. With a coastline of 18,000 kilometers, the Philippines is very vulnerable to sea level rise.
“We have low-lying islands, which we are afraid are going to be underwater permanently once we reach the point of global warming of 1.5,” Dr. Tibig forecasted. “And sea level rise actually results from the melting of the sea ice cover, including ice sheets and glaciers in the polar regions. Because in the polar regions, temperature increases can sometimes be as much as 40 degrees centigrade. So that ice melts actually at zero degrees.”
Once the temperature plunges to change, rather, goes up to more than zero degrees, melting becomes faster. “So, the melting of these glaciers in the polar regions adds to the thermal expansion of the seas and oceans as this warms up,” Dr. Tibig said, adding that sea level rise in the country has been observed to be higher than the global rate – especially during the period of 1993 to 2015.
The country’s weather bureau said that between now and 2100, sea level rise in the country would be at an average of 0.2 meter by the end of the 21st century. But climate scientists contend it’s much worse than that. “Because when projections for sea level rise are done, it depends, the findings will depend on which of these components are included in the modeling,” Dr. Tibig said.
A study conducted by the Philippine Country Study to Address Climate Change found that the Manila Bay is already subjected to several hazards, including flooding and storms. “Shoreline changes due to reclamation for housing, ports, coastal roads, buildings and other urbanized development are high, adding to an increased threat of inundation,” the study said.
Sulu is the province with the highest land area that is highly vulnerable to sea level rise. In this southern Philippines province, 90% of the land area of Pata municipality, and 34% of the land area of Marunggas municipality are vulnerable to the rise, according to the group.
Aside from Sulu, the other provinces vulnerable to sea level rise are Palawan, Zamboanga del Sur, Northern Samar, Zamboanga Sibugay, Basilan, Cebu, Davao del Norte, Bohol, Camarines Sur, Quezon, Tawi-Tawi, Masbate, Negros Occidental, Camarines Norte, Capiz, Catanduanes, Samar, Zamboanga del Norte, and Maguindanao.
“Not only will great numbers of our people be displaced, entire communities including their source of livelihood, their cultures and traditions will likewise be changed and dislocated forever,” deplored the late Heherson T. Alvarez, who was the convening chairman of the Asia-Pacific Leaders’ Conference on Climate Change held in Manila in 1995.
According to the fact sheet, which is published by the Climate Change Commission (which was created under Republic Act 9729), there are two main approaches to address climate change: adaptation and mitigation.
On adaptation, the fact sheet explains: “In human systems, the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In natural systems, the process of adjustment to actual climate and its effects; human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate.”
On mitigation, the fact sheet gives this explanation: “Technological change and change in activities that reduce resource inputs and emissions per unit of output and implementing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance sinks.”
So far, the Philippines has achieved only two types of actions in terms of levels of climate change adaptation, namely: resilience-building and climate-proofing. This is according to Dr. Perez.
In resilience-building, the country has been addressing the adaptation deficit, such as to diversify livelihood activities according to the variable conditions of the place. It also ventures into crop insurance and other agricultural innovations on irrigation, as well as adapting seasonal forecasting and early warning systems to reduce the effects of disasters.
Climate-proofing, on the other hand, is adapting to incremental changes by strengthening structures and natural shields and protections. This would include upgrading drainage systems to accommodate greater runoff, adapting shorter cropping systems in areas with more frequent visits of natural disasters, and estimating periods of greater water stress and heat extremes.
“Climate is changing and will continue to do so,” Dr. Perez reminded. “Currently, the impacts on many sectors are still unclear, but may become more pronounced as warming continues. So, we need to focus on understanding, adaptation, and preparation. We, Filipinos, should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but for the right reasons.” – ###
