RP has 1M ‘climate refugees,’ and count is rising

I-TEAM REPORT: THINK ISSUES

(10th of a series)

BOTOLAN, ZAMBALES— Ernesto Castillo never had it so good until Mt. Pinatubo erupted and forced him to face the inconvenient truth about the perils of climate change.

An Aeta, the wiry 45-year-old used to plant sweet potatoes and vegetables and hunt on the slopes of the long-dormant volcano before it rumbled to life in 1991 and belched millions of tons of ash and sulfur dioxide.

“It was OK,” Castillo says of his life before the eruption that killed 800 people and displaced 100,000. His cash crops had given him a good income.

The fine volcanic ash that Pinatubo spewed blanketed a wide expanse of the surrounding areas and obliterated the land he tilled.

The sulfur dioxide discharged into the atmosphere eased global warming for several years, scientists say. However, the continued emission of greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution in the 18th century did little to arrest environmental damage.

Climate change is one of the major campaign issues in the May 10 elections, but it has grabbed little attention in the current debates. Candidates with “green agendas” are falling far behind in popularity surveys in the run-up to the balloting.

Storms heavily laden with rain last year and the current dry spell sweeping the country accentuate the environmental threats ahead, hounding people like Castillo, who had been moving from place to place to farm and hunt for survival.

Three years ago, the short and dusky Aeta with streaks of gray in his kinky hair found a small plot to cultivate in the resort town of Botolan at the edge of the South China Sea. But a series of storms beginning in August inundated the area and forced him to flee again.

Castillo’s hut was washed away, along with hundreds of other dwellings, as lahar-bearing floods breached a 6-kilometer dike and flooded wide areas of Botolan.

He sought refuge in an abandoned warehouse called “E-Cube”—one of the evacuation centers set up for the flood victims.

Roughly 3,400 people, or 678 families, whose houses were destroyed still crammed the encampments—two warehouses and several makeshift colonies of tents and plastic shelters. They included scores of Aeta, the nomadic group indigenous to Central Luzon.

More intense storms seen

Some 1 million victims of Storms “Ondoy” (international codename: Ketsana) and “Pepeng” (Parma) were still either in evacuation centers last month or were being assisted in their homes in Metro Manila and 19 provinces, mainly by the World Food Programme (WFP), six months after the storms struck.

They were evidence of the government’s inability over the long haul to deal with the caprice of climate change that, experts say, is likely to bring more violent typhoons that whip the country annually from the Pacific.

The prolonged drought now searing the country from Aparri to Zamboanga poses another challenge. It has dried up farmlands, reservoirs and waterways, shut down power plants and damaged 576,607 metric tons of agricultural crops officially estimated at P8.5 billion at last count.

Warm waters have killed tons of fish; steaming temperatures have caused fevers in pig farms.

The dry spell is blamed on El Niño, a weather phenomenon characterized by warmer-than-normal sea temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that trigger drought in Asia and Australia and wet winters in North America.

Shift in climatic conditions

“There has been a definite shift in climatic conditions,” says Nereus Acosta, a former Bukidnon representative who authored the ground-breaking Clean Air Act and, with a green agenda, is seeking a Senate seat in the May elections.

Already, says Acosta, the melting of polar ice caps and warming seas—outlined in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”—have submerged by two meters coastal areas in Malabon, Navotas, and Naga, among several dozen “hot spots.”

“The Philippines has very high vulnerability to climate change, but very low adaptive capability,” says Acosta, 43, who teaches environmental protection at the Asian Institute of Management.

In other words, he says, we are unprepared to deal with environmental catastrophes.

“At the height of Ondoy, when 80 percent of Metro Manila was in some form of inundation, we only had 17 lifeboats,” Acosta says. “It shows the very weakness of the adaptive capability of this country.”

Disaster prone

UN scientists see 20 to 30 percent of species being threatened with mass extinction if temperatures rise by 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. At a rise of 4 degrees, they say, few ecosystems will be able to adapt.

Half of the country’s more than 1,497 municipalities ring the coast of more than 7,000 islands, with half of the population depending on seafood as a primary source of protein.

A one-meter increase in sea levels could put 64 of the country’s 80 provinces, or 80 percent, in harm’s way, affecting 700 million square meters of coastal lands, says the environmental group Greenpeace.

The Philippines is already the world’s fourth most-disaster-prone country, according to the nongovernment Citizens’ Disaster Response Center. In 2006 alone, 3 million Filipinos, or about 3.5 percent of the population, were affected by disasters.

In the wake of the devastating storms last year, an international relief effort went under way to complement emergency assistance mobilized by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) that included massive donations from here and abroad.

The WFP dispatched two giant Antonov helicopters to ferry urgently needed relief aid for six weeks to storm-stricken areas, particularly in the Cordilleras hard hit by landslides that isolated villages.

WFP assistance

Today, the WFP still provides the poorest and most affected families a monthly food ration consisting of 25 kilos of rice, five liters of cooking oil, two kilos of high protein biscuits for malnourished children, and two kilos of canned fish. A special feeding program for children under 2 years of age has been mounted to help prevent malnutrition.

Beginning this month, the UN food agency is launching a “food for work” program, offering the poorest and most vulnerable families five kilos of rice a day for such tasks as repairing shelters, roads, irrigation and declogging drainage.

Stephen Anderson, the WFP’s country representative, says his agency has so far raised $33.5 million for its emergency relief and recovery program and is working on a target beneficiary of up to 1.5 million Filipinos as a result of the prolonged drought.

He says he is pleased with the progress of the relief effort so far and is grateful for the generous support from donors.

“The challenge is early recovery,” he says. “We want to help communities rebuild and, depending on circumstances, prepare for future disasters.”

The National Disaster Coordinating Center says the drought this year has so far affected 301,000 families—roughly 1.5 million people—mostly in the agricultural sector, where many of the country’s poor are found.

The poor—who are surviving on a dollar a day, the poverty threshold defined by the World Bank—comprise a third of the nation’s population of 90 million, according to a 2006 survey by the National Statistical Coordination Board,

The WFP aid is dispensed by the DWSD. Delivery and performance is monitored by staff of the DSWD, WFP and its NGO partners, such as the Community and Family Services International (CFSI) and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency.

UN’s protection concerns

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has dispatched a team to look into possible “protection concerns” of these people—shelter, sanitation and malnutrition.

In addition, the UNHCR has entered into a partnership with the CFSI to provide relief assistance to especially vulnerable individuals, like persons with disabilities, and quick impact projects that aim to help affected communities meet urgent needs, such as livelihood for women.

Unicef—the UN Children’s Fund—has responded to the disaster, with a particular focus on the psychosocial needs of children and immediate relief needs of affected families.

The United Nations describes the storm evacuees as “environmentally induced migrants.” Charity groups call them “environmental” or “climate refugees,” although the UN shies away from the label.

The term “refugees” exclusively applies, according to the 1951 Geneva conventions, to people who are fleeing “a well-founded fear of persecution” and are outside their country, thereby requiring UN protection.

But the term has entered the lexicon of international humanitarian discourse as ecological disasters struck many regions in Africa south of the Sahara badly needing assistance, according to Acosta.

The evacuees in Botolan are certainly no less miserable than the victims of wars, ethnic conflicts and disasters in Asia, Africa and the Balkans.

The tents housing the displaced people of Botolan are sizzling hot inside under the blazing sun. Many of the plastic sheets are worn out and badly need repairs. The displaced have no sources of steady income.

Relocation on bald mountain

Mayor Rogelio Yap of Botolan, concerned at the approaching typhoon season, is moving swiftly to relocate the flood victims and rebuild the breached dikes to prevent another disaster.

“Normally, the rainy season starts in June, but with this global warming, we really don’t know what will happen,” Yap says.

The municipality has allocated P65 million for the development of a 50-hectare relocation site on Bucao mountain overlooking the spectacular Botolan beach, but the evacuees are reluctant to move to the barren area.

They say engineers from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau who had investigated the place found cracks along the snaking dirt road being carved out of the mountain slopes by heavy equipment prior to cementing.

Boulders mixed with mud indicate the area could be prone to landslides, the land foundation was weak, water and electricity were nonexistent, according to site surveyors quoted by evacuee leaders.

“This area is not suited for settlement,” says Nestor Acuavera, a DSWD project development officer. “It’s very risky for the people.”

Ana Lisa Jaring, 41, says the evacuees had proposed three alternative sites in the lowland to the mayor, but were told the areas selected were prone to flooding as well.

“We will probably survive the flooding, but we could be buried alive in the mountain,” Jaring says.

Vulnerable to tailwinds

Yap scoffs at such talk. “I have been here for 65 years, I have not heard of an avalanche in the area.”

Bulldozers are compacting the site, he says. There will be a concrete road to the settlement before houses are built. He adds that a day care center, schools, and recreation center facilities will follow, making the place a veritable Shangri-la.

The houses will be built by the evacuees themselves as soon as the DSWD provides funding to purchase P70,000 worth of materials for each of the displaced families.

The question is: Will this type of low-cost housing on an elevated site, exposed to the elements, withstand the powerful tail winds of typhoons exiting the country into the South China Sea from the Pacific?

At a recent meeting, representatives of the DSWD and CFSI told the evacuees about possibilities of a better life in the resettlement site.

Castillo, clasping his hands behind his back, stood at the fringe, listening. “I never went to school. I don’t know what is happening. I only know that there is always the threat of storms wherever I go.” –Fernando del Mundo, Philippine Daily Inquirer