| El Niño 2010 |
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| Tuesday, 23 February 2010 | |||||||||
The Philippines is in for a long and hot summer. Beyond the images of sandy beaches and the annual trek to Boracay, we are looking at images of parched lands, cracked soils, wilted and dying crops, and steadily declining water reservoirs and dams.
We are talking of El Niño 2010 but the weather bureau says it won't be
as bad as 1997. But what does this mean and what did the El Niño
1997-1998 mean for people? Maybe we don't worry in the cities until
water rationing starts, but hopefully we have learned to care a little
more.
El Niño is the local story of Peruvian fisherfolk who on certain years lost their harvest of anchovies. It was when the systems of the ocean turned upside down at Christmas time. Then similar untoward shifts in climate occurred in different parts of the world and eventually scientists put this together as a connected sequence of changes now called ENSO, El Niño and the Southern Oscillation. We cannot change ENSO, but we can change our response and adapt. Any greater awareness and adaptation is going along the right path also for responding to climate change, something we do need to respond to more and more, even if the energy centers of the world do mitigate their carbon production.
What have we learned in Asia since 1997? Yes, there will be less rain. How much less is not sure, but for people in Mindanao who were measuring it at the time, rainfall dropped from 150 to 350 millimeters (mm) per month to 40 mm per month. The difference in figures alone tell us the severity of the situation even if we cannot imagine 40 mm slowly dripping out over a month to feed a plant. We would use perhaps the same amount of water to absentmindedly wash our face and freshen up.
Less rainfall means there is less water in the soil and therefore, less water in the rivers. It also means there is less water in the atmosphere or what is called" green water," the water that evaporates and is transpired by plants. If there is not much water in the atmosphere, the wilt factor increases and maize production fails all across the land. In the cities, probably we have learned to consume less water. In the uplands, this translates to planting more kamote (sweet potato) as it keeps growing at a slow pace but gives basic food while the maize may fail.
The lack of preparedness for an event that has happened and will always happen is reflected in the stories we hear of irrigation sources drying up, with minimal attention given to water impoundment. In the Bengal region (politically an area both of India and Bangladesh), every family nearly has a pond or water source. This region in the northeastern part of the Indian subcontinent is located in the low-lying areas of the Ganges Delta. This is an adaptation the Philippines has not caught on as a necessary adaptation in many areas. The tricky part in all of this is we cannot get away from our responsibilities of knowing better the different aspects and interconnectedness of the problem, whether it is hydrological, ecological, and social, and then doing something. For the uplands, it is a simple loss of food source. The land dries out and there are more fires, and there will be less water coming down the rivers. This is where the translation of the suffering of the uplands has a way of reaching the towns: the ecological services, or the disruption thereof. Ecological services
Ecological services are the result of complex relations within the environment that are conducive to public benefit, welfare, health, and safety. In taking greater responsibilities for the environmental relations and ensuring basic benefits to marginal communities, a greater knowledge of the land use management and location of basic needs for human well-being need to be integrated. Many Indigenous Peoples over past centuries have retreated to the uplands given the aggressiveness of lowland agricultural communities. Now that the lowland economy and needs has extended to the uplands, the Indigenous Peoples are blamed for restricting the resource need of the majority urban and agricultural populations without consideration of their needs, rights, and way of living. These services may be specified as fertile land, good quality of air and water, cultural landscapes, and rich biodiversity. These services cannot simply be used or extracted without consideration for other dependencies and the impact on related ecological systems and local communities. Often these services are assumed to be always available and generally without cost. Now that there is increasing pressure on the environment and the negative impact of some activities or over-utilization, the use of resources must be changed along with the expectation of services from the environment. The ecological functions of forests that are the core provider of services, along with the sustaining climate are presented below, after which these functions can be viewed from the side of society as the services or benefits received. The forest functions include: Supporting natural processes
Regulatory processes
Provisioning of human needs
All these are the functions of the forest and the resulting services and benefits to community and society. Our management responses as a society today are many but the quality and integration of the management strategies leaves much to be worked out.
There are management strategies already happening with limited impact such as watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, community based forestry and ancestral management, and landscape protection and ecotourism.
Strategies needed with increased impact are: integrated watershed management, river flood resilience with knowledge of risk parameters, culturally integrated conservation, assisted natural regeneration and indigenous forest cover, focused attention to the attainment of Millennium Development Goals and improvement of the Human Development Index, relocation matched with livelihood access, payment for environmental services returning to community management efforts, and carbon sequestration returning to community management. The economy does not warn us of environmental destruction, only economic loss. But somewhere there is need for a "rootedness" of this economic loss to reach ecological relations and know the environmental risks. A cultural approach is so valid given that people have a natural relation to sustainability that is based on the land, and not solely on the economy. We must find equitable ways of working together and sustaining our world as a whole. |
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 10 March 2010 ) | |||||||||
