An even more dire warning

I live in a residential compound in Banilad that shares a wall with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources regional office. Trees abound the place, including the area inside our compound. Beside the house, in particular, are fruit-bearing trees Santol (cotton fruit) and Tambis (watery apple fruit). There is another tree which started to grow in the backyard some years back but I don’t know what species it is. It came from a seed that came out from bird droppings, I guess.

Before a garage space was built unto the front of the house, I used to park the car under one of the Santol trees. The way those birds drop their poop from above splattering on the vehicle each morning was a source of constant irritation at first but which I later came to tolerate.

The trees also pose problems, foremost among them are the thud-thudding ripe fruits dropping from the trees, a soft thud when the fruits land on the ground and a sharp one when they land on the car. The need to sweep up the leaves falling from those trees on some months of the year is just a minor concern.

The greatest reward from these minor troubles, of course, is the sweet chirping of birds that greet us every morning. To quote a post on Twitter, “The signs of summer are approaching with the humming of birds making my heart sing.” It is indeed heart-warming to have birds dropping by our place regularly, maybe to cool down and rest in the tree’s branches before heading back to the mountain. And in this unusually dry and hot weather, trees do make areas under their shade cooler by several degrees.

Such gifts from nature may not be with us for long if we believe a recent report from Australia's Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration (Breakthrough). Breakthrough describes itself as “an independent think tank that develops critical thought leadership to influence the national climate debate and policymaking.” I only heard of it now, but its latest report about climate change has been picked up by mainstream international media agencies and online scientific publications.

Breakthrough's dire warning is: Ninety percent of humans will perish in 31 years if nothing drastic is done now to curb carbon emission. That's being alarmist, of course. But the mainstream science behind climate change and its expected devastating effects have even been acknowledged by many experts as too conservative in their appraisal of what lies ahead soon. There is no historical model to compare the situation now and tomorrow; we and the generations after us will be facing environmental problems at an unprecedented scale.

“Time has run out for half measures,” says Breakthrough, “and it is now imperative that work begins to restore safe climate conditions as fast as humanly possible – this will require action at emergency scale and speed.” My friend could be right when he commented on social media that it is cruel to bring a child into this world at the rate we are destroying our planet.

For sure, we cannot afford to be paralyzed by apathy, fear, or depression, and should act in crisis mode and try to achieve a consensus globally that climate change is staring us in the face. We must acknowledge that inaction or lack of action now will leave our children later with an uninhabitable world.

It may mean more than just tolerating the thud-thudding overripe fruits dropping on the car from the tree that shall never be cut. But am I ready to ditch the car for a mass transport system? Yes, of course, and for starters give us that BRT for Cebu already. It has been studied well and needs to be implemented as part of the climate change mitigation measures. If I may digress a bit, all that talk about LRT or monorail for Cebu is mere talk until experts come up with an engineering and market feasibility report about it.

A fossil-fuel based world has overstayed its welcome. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the rapid loss of species we see today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. In just a few years, the birds which have all the right to drop their poop on my car may no longer be around to hum their sweet melodies each morning.