RP faces own ‘inconvenient truth’
By Tarra Quismundo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:16:00 04/30/2008
MANILA, Philippines—Half of Naga City submerged along with five eastern towns in the Bicol region, and between 20 million to 30 million turned into environment refugees across the Philippines.
Speaking of the country’s own “inconvenient truth,” environmentalists Tuesday painted this grim forecast at a conference on climate change and conflict at the Asian Institute of Management’s Policy Center in Makati.
The scenario may well happen within the century if people continue to disregard the consequences of a warmer planet, they said.
Nereus Acosta, convenor of the Philippine Climate Change Initiative and a former Bukidnon congressman, said sea levels rising just a meter would submerge 15 of the country’s 17 regions, with the northern highlands as the only areas spared from the catastrophe.
Environmental refugees
“The Philippines as an archipelago is considered a climate hotspot ... with 20 out of 80 provinces vulnerable to a one-meter rise in sea level,” Acosta said in a presentation before an audience that included officers from the environment and energy departments, the academe and non-government organizations.
Provinces in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, the Zamboanga Peninsula, Eastern Visayas and the Bicol region are among places to be worst hit by widespread flooding because of rising global sea levels, according to Acosta.
Incidentally, these places have high poverty incidence and the greatest food insecurity, he said.
“With these regions affected, there will be 20 million to 30 million people who will be dislocated. They will become environmental refugees who will be fighting for scarce resources,” said Acosta in an interview.
He based his estimates on published international studies on climate change, including that of the Nobel Prize-winner Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and James Hansen, a climate scientist with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, who studied carbon dioxide emission levels worldwide.
New People’s Navy
At one point, Acosta cracked a joke just to break the silence of the audience. “Maybe our 7,100 islands will be reduced to 6,000 because we will be under a permanent high tide. And in the Cordilleras, maybe the New People’s Army (NPA) will change its name to the New People’s Navy,” he said. The NPA is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Asked how imminent the threat was, Acosta said: “In 20 to 50 years, if you go by the science. And James Hansen said we have crossed the borderline level of CO2 emissions.”
Dangerous tipping point
Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted by automobiles and factories, has long been identified as the primary contributor to a warmer planet. Hansen has found that CO2 trapped in the planet is at a “dangerous tipping point of 385 parts per million.”
Studies have shown that rising temperatures could lead to extreme weather, including stronger typhoons, drought, heat waves and heavy flooding.
Joyce Palacol, ecology program coordinator at the National Secretariat for Social Action Justice and Peace, an arm of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), told the audience that just a half-meter rise in sea levels would inundate the eastern half of Camarines Sur province.
Using a map, he showed how half of Naga City and surrounding towns in the eastern part of Camarines Sur would be inundated by waters from the Philippine Sea “with just a .5-meter rise in sea level.”
Palacol also noted a rising rate of depletion of the country’s natural resources.
Moral issue
The forest cover shrank from between 70 and 80 percent in the 1900s to 18 percent in 2002, of which less than 3 percent was original cover and the rest salvaged through reforestation, he said.
Palacol said that Philippine mangrove areas from 1918 to 1997 were reduced to 24.7 percent, most of which was lost to conversion into fishponds.
In addition, coral reefs, home to the country’s diverse marine life, have been degraded by cyanide, dynamite and commercial fishing, he said.
“Climate change is a moral issue and the CBCP is undertaking these studies under its role to protect the integrity of creation,” Palacol said.
A study by International Alert, a global non-government organization for peace-building, placed the Philippines among 46 nations “facing a high risk of armed conflict as a knock-on consequence of climate change.”
The list includes Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Nepal, Rwanda, Somalia and Sierra Leone.
“There is a real risk that climate change will compound the propensity for violent conflict, which in turn will make communities poorer, less resilient and less able to cope with the consequences of climate change,” said International Alert in the Philippine edition of its publication, “A Climate of Conflict: The Links Between Climate Change, Peace and War.”
The group estimated that some 2.7 billion people in these countries would suffer the effects of climate-aggravated violence.
Some 56 other states were identified to be at “high risk of facing political instability” because of climate change, among them nations in Latin America, poorer nations in Europe and even powerful states such as North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
“[I]t is safe to predict that the consequences of climate change will combine with other factors to put additional strain on already fragile social and political systems. These are the conditions in which conflicts flourish and cannot be resolved without violence because governments are arbitrary, inept and corrupt,” said International Alert’s November 2007 report that was released in Manila Tuesday.
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