Farewell to rain

I worry that I have not been to Mindanao. Well, technically, I have been there but that was over 20 years ago when my job had me lifted by a doorless gunship to the top of Mt. Diwalwal during a mining disaster that tragically washed away many small-scale gold miners to their end. But since then, for some reason, life never takes me there. I met some Davaoeños lately and while am aware of all of Mindanao’s natural gifts, I succumbed to sheer self-interest and asked them if they were aware of how lucky they were that they have such an abundant supply of fruits, including my favorite pomelo.

I will make time to go to Mindanao soon and I am being pushed less by a personal bucket list but more by a recent scientific study. The study, which was featured in the March 2011 issue of the Scientific American, says that most likely, the rains that southern Philippines have relied on throughout our natural and recorded history, will be largely abandoning Mindanao. And according to the study, it is not just Mindanao but many other areas on the equator, including Columbia, Ecuador, Northern Indonesia, and Malaysia, which have traditionally adapted to this movement of rain. The band of heavy rain, which has largely defined our way of life, economics, agriculture, even tourism, is moving north of the equator.

The equator is the imaginary mid-line around the Earth’s girth. We define our locations partly on where we are with respect to the equator (the other half is the Prime Meridian). The Philippines is located between 6 degrees north (Jolo) and 19 degrees north (Batanes) of the equator. Along the equator, the natural wind currents coming from north and south carry the rains dropped by the evaporated equatorial waters. The area in which these rains fall is called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

Climate scientists Julian Sachs of the University of Washington and Conor Myrhvold did the important study featured in the Scientific American and according to their article, the midpoint of this band of rains used to be south of 5 degrees N but based on their data, it has now moved 3 degrees to 10 degrees N, as far north as it has ever been in the last 1,200 years. They did this by collecting meters of sediments from the Pacific Ocean, which contain algae. Deep sediments mean they belong to the past. Examining and dating algae buried in deep sediments allow scientists to figure out how much rain was present at that time. And the evidence pointed to a trend, which I can suspect, saddened and worried them. The trend seems to be that things are going to drastically change for many places along or near the equator. This is why I worry about Mindanao and for that matter, all other islands, countries or not, that rely on this seasonal band of rains to sustain them.

But I had reason to worry even more because the study revealed that the heating caused by greenhouse gases that would have doubled by 2050 and tripled by 2100 will heat our planet two or three times more than what occurred 1200 years ago. And this could move the band of rains even farther north, as far as 550 kilometers more, abandoning not just Mindanao but central Philippines.

We need to prepare. Economically, we need to learn how to adapt our agriculture and our sources of energy. What crops would we have to learn how to grow with this change in climate? What would happen to the hydropower in Mindanao when the rains stop coming in a reliable way? For our collective lives, will our festivals, which are usually held in honor of natural seasons, be passé? Would they have to be revised and a new story evolve about people and the rains that fed them? But before then, how much suffering would people bear as we figure out what to do?

The article, in fact, cited the big banana harvest disaster in the Philippines last year when the rains did not come in the strength and constancy we have previously counted on. It also named Manila as one of the places that would get a lot more rain than before. And as Ondoy is still a “brain ache” for me as I remember how much we all suffered then in this big city, Manila as a water-city simply drowns my most optimistic tendencies.

What kind of Filipinos would we be without the rains that we have always counted on in the seasons they come?

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