Defying disasters of Philippine vulnerabilities

A few weeks before the 2012 World Environment Day was observed yesterday by countries and the United Nations Environment Program, President Benigno Aquino III did something thoughtful to make this event more meaningful to Filipinos.

Without fanfare, the President issued an executive order that may be a defining moment in our government’s efforts to adapt if not to arrest the destructive impact of climate change, further integrate sustainable development into our development programs, and reverse the progressive ruin of our environment — our life support systems.

This new executive order brings into ambit the development of river basin management as a priority program of the Aquino administration, and it is serendipitous that it occurs on the eve of Rio+20, the UN conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro later this month. The President alluded to rivers as historic drivers of our economy during last week’s International River Summit at Iloilo City.

The Philippines is a fragile tropical paradise. It is distinctively archipelagic, with a seemingly endless coastline of 34,000 kilometers (longer than continental USA) with thousands of small islands and narrow land masses bifurcated by river basins. Idyllic, definitely, but only under normal conditions.

With intensifying climate change and global warming impacts on the planet, particularly in the tropics, the Philippines has an Achilles heel — it is predisposed to environmental destruction — flash floods, sea level rise, storm surges, land/mud slides and catastrophic droughts. Periodically, they put at risk 65 percent of our communities thriving along our coastal areas and deltas of our great river basins.

The result is the Philippines rates as the world’s third most vulnerable country after Bangladesh and Vanuatu.

Annual costs of natural calamities in direct damages are estimated at $400 million or more than 0.5 percent of the country’s GNP. Including rehabilitation and reconstruction expenditures, together with opportunity losses, the damages would average $1 billion annually — a huge burden for a developing nation.

When the tropical island of Cuba was hit by a 200 mile per hour typhoon, Fidel Castro exclaimed that it was not a storm, but a Hiroshima bomb.

 This is the grim possibility that we must prepare for by managing, anticipating and reducing risks. We must develop the capacity to manage not one but two tropical storms as well as develop technical and engineering skills, together with creative cultural communications that bonds the political will and public support to protect our archipelagic environment.

How do we empower our people and our communities at risk and ensure that our life support systems will not only protect them but enhance the capacity for survival and well-being?

Against this background, President Aquino’s executive order becomes even more significant, bringing, as it does, into ambit the development of 18 river basins as a priority program of the administration.

The Philippines has 412 rivers in 119 proclaimed watersheds. Of these, 19 are considered major river basins. As vital drivers of the Philippine economy, the rivers and their basins have become the new focus of the country’s program for sustainable development.

 The river basin approach builds strong resilience to climate change. It is a comprehensive land use plan based on principles of sustainable development as well as on climate change adaptation and mitigation.

A river basin is a portion of land drained by a river and its tributaries. It is typically surrounded by watersheds or areas of forested highlands. Waters from multiple streams and creeks flow eventually into one river.

The river basin development program, called the Integrated and Ecosystem-based River Basin Management Project, is concentrating its initial phase on the Cagayan River, the country’s longest river. Meandering through the Sierra Madre, the Cordillera Central, and the Caraballo mountain ranges, the Cagayan flows almost 600 kilometers from the headwaters ridge to the reefs of the Babuyan Channel.

The goal is to manage Cagayan River basin resources in an effective, sustainable and equitable manner. This will mean improving the lives of over five million Filipinos in the region, restoring and protecting the watersheds. For the rest of Luzon it means improving food security to over 45 million Filipinos. River basin management can provide the scale required to ensure that interventions for building adaptive and resilience to climate change will be cost-effective.

DENR Secretary Ramon Paje along with Undersecretary Demetrio Ignacio and Director Vicente Tuddao Jr. are overseeing the master plan. Teams of engineers, technicians, scientists and community leaders are now addressing vital inter-related concerns — watershed conservation, flood mitigation, clean water source, agricultural and fishery production, power generation, and poverty alleviation.

 When all the basic details are in, the planning experts at NEDA and major government agencies will determine the financial inputs. The level of investments will be significant, and it will be necessary to tap carbon credits, bilateral donors, the International Development Association, and most especially the $100 billion Green Fund approved in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban.

In this respect, on the eve of the Rio+20 Conference, on June 19, 2012, the Philippines will lead a “Tri-Continental South-South Dialogue in Defying Disasters”, in partnership with Kenya and Colombia, as a UN official side event. Endorsed by UNESCO and major Philippine agencies, this will be a unique sharing of indigenous and global best practices in defying climate change disasters that threaten the tropical zone.

Philippine initiatives in river basin development spring from the Rio perspectives 20 years ago. The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro recommended integrated approaches to the development, management and use of water resources.

Any investment in sustainable development will be an investment in “the future that we want.” And it is our obligation to insure that the investment will be supported by essential policy reforms and regulation changes.

 Far more important, such investments will put the Philippines on the positive side of the ledger in terms of intra-generational and intergenerational equity.

In this sense, the river basins project will be significantly bridging the gradual shift to a green Philippine economy — an economy that results in broader human well-being, while significantly reducing environmental risks and enhancing natural capital.

(Heherson T. Alvarez is former Secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and was a two-term Senator. As Climate Change Commissioner, he is lead convenor of the Tri-Continental South-South Dialogue in Defying Disasters, with Kenya and Colombia, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on June 19, 2012, the eve of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.)