Disasters: Seven steps to a safer Philippines

REPUBLIC SERVICE
Ricardo  Saludo

The disaster movie 2012 used special effects to depict imaginary scenes of skyscraping cities lacerated by earthquakes and engulfed by rising seas and erupting lava. In her lecture a week ago, titled “2012 (Not the Movie): A Practical Guide to Disaster Risk and Preparedness,” Manila Observatory executive director Maria Antonia Yulo Loyzaga needed no animation to portray the dangers of calamity.

Aerial shots of Pampanga and Bulacan, inundated by the Pedring and Quiel storms, dramatized how bad our disasters can get—and how human actions and inaction make them even worse. As highlighted by UP geology professor Mahar Lagmay’s commentary on Toni Loyzaga’s talk at the Ateneo’s Jaime V. Ongpin Lecture Series, urban areas blocked floodwaters seeking the sea, keeping Calumpit and many other places under water weeks after the rains.

That is just one of the many danger signs in Dir. Loyzaga’s presentation pointing to even more calamities and casualties ahead for the third-most calamity-prone country in the world: the Philippines is rated 24.32 in the World Risk Index, after Pacific island states Tonga (32) and Vanuatu (29.08). Other potential disaster time bombs: 50 million schoolchildren in quake areas and 15 million people living in coastal areas threatened by rising sea levels.

Dir. Loyzaga’s message, however, is not that people are hopelessly at risk, but that better response mechanisms as well as long-term programs to address calamity hazards—factors within our control—can greatly reduce disaster deaths and destruction in our land. Indeed, lack of coping capacity is the main reason for the Philippines’ risk index grade.

So what does the Manila Observatory head prescribe to improve disaster readiness and reduce risk? Some pretty basic stuff, which unfortunately doesn’t get done in a lot of places, given the short-term, self-serving perspectives of many leaders. But for those in power who do care about the body count, crop losses, infrastructure damage, and other calamity destruction, here’s Dir. Loyzaga’s list.

First, make a plan. That means asking experts to assess the hazards one’s community or company faces. Thankfully, after years of hazard mapping accelerated in the Arroyo Administration, nearly all the country has been assessed for calamity risk. With hazards known, coping measures can be put in place.

Second, learn to ask for help and work with others. Disasters don’t respect provincial, city and municipal boundaries, so those at risk should be able to find others in the same hazard zone who need to prepare for quake, flood, eruption, sea surge, drought, or all of the above. By joining hands, more resources can be harnessed especially in addressing the weakest links in the response and risk reduction chain.

Cooperation is also needed for the third action: build a case for intervention. Costly, disruptive and unpopular measures are imperative, from resettlement of informal settlers living along waterways, to the interminably delayed enactment of a national land use law with calamity prevention provisions. To get tough interventions moving, they need collective pressure at various levels, from Palace and Congress to boardrooms and barangay halls, city streets and country fields.

Dir. Loyzaga also stresses the need to set clear, achievable targets and parameters. There should be baselines based on current levels of risk or capability, thresholds that mark where casualties could leap, and accountability for what must be done. She also underscores the need to establish institutional arrangements that link science to policy, so that state laws and directives are informed by sound knowledge, not political expediency and vested interests.

If political leaders need disaster experts to craft policy, the latter must have the former on their side too, not only to institute the right initiatives, but also to explain measures to the people in the citizenry’s own terms. That is Dir. Loyzaga’s fifth tenet: communicate in the voice of the audience.

It’s never enough to read out typhoon coordinates and millimeters of precipitation or show off satellite maps. Instead, people need to be told what havoc a coming storm could wreak and how a threatened community can protect itself. PhDs can use some political savvy to get expert points across.

The Manila Observatory’s boss showed her firm grasp of realities on the ground with her sixth advice: have a Plan B. She knows from many years in both business and science how the best laid plans of mice and men are Swiss-cheesed with holes. Going from ideas to execution will be fraught with unforeseen obstacles and errors, so be ready with contingency measures and detours.

But whatever the twists and turns, it is most important to maintain one’s strategic directions. Rather than getting lost in the inevitably messy work of disaster response and risk reduction, Dir. Loyzaga counsels: be strategic. That is most crucial especially with global warming altering the calamity equation fundamentally for decades to come.

“Climate change changes everything,” says the former property executive, from sea levels and storm frequency and intensity, to crop yields and the spread of disease. She notes, for instance, that every one degree warming of the world would cut rice yields by 10 percent.

So while our nation debates then forgets this morning’s headlines, Toni Loyzaga’s advocacy reminds us of the catastrophes ahead if we don’t act. And in keeping 95 million Filipinos working on what needs to be done to avert future disasters, we need more than ever the strategic vision and focused leadership that drives the long-term agenda amid the potboiler issues.

Let’s pray we get that leadership. Or else, thousands will die. –Ricardo Saludo, Manila Times