Tackling Climate Change Now—Our Way

In 1991 my mom’s village in Oriental Negros was left flooded after a week's worth of rain fell in just one September Saturday morning.

Flood reached waist-high even in our elevated district. The nearby river spilled murky brown waters to the highway, creating a massive traffic jam. I was only 9 years old then.

Eighteen years after, I am seeing hundreds of thousands of people in Manila and nearby provinces suffer a similar ordeal—on an even greater scale. The stories of shock and loss are countless. Some of us who have experienced it before already know what it's like and how bad it can be.

We know for a fact that such extremities of calamity are explainable by the change in global climate levels. What we don’t notice is that the issue of climate change has been hounding the world as early as the 1980s. Yet sadly, we ignore it until a natural disaster of this intensity happens.

We'd seen steps at the legislative front: the clean air act, renewable energy law, disaster preparedness, the now defunct anti-smoke belching law, carbon tax and green technology research and development. But these laws have been hardly implemented especially in residential and business communities where the most number of garbage is generated.

When we hear of seminars or events regarding climate change and what we can do in our small ways to help save the environment, we easily dismiss it as “not worth our time”, maybe not interesting enough or unpopular. But truth is, only a few of us really know the impact our every activity on nature.

One person that I admire for not giving up on educating people about environmental issues for many decades now is Senator Loren Legarda.

From the time that she was a journalist and host of The Inside Story and an environmental show on ABS-CBN until she became a senator, the environment has always been at the center of her advocacies.

I feel for her climate change advocacy. Others may think that she is exaggerating the effects of climate change in her speeches, or find her title as United Nations Regional Champion for climate change adaptation and disaster preparedness as pretentious but in the face of Ondoy’s wrath, we now know that she was right after all.

Ms. Loren has been around the country and the world because of her job. She has seen the bounty and wrath of nature side by side. I feel frustrated to watch someone’s passion about a critical and timely issue being ignored. I hope we could all join her in making efforts to understand the issue and to come up with feasible solutions at a grassroots level.

The environmental rehabilitation cannot be left to the DENR alone. It needs to be a national priority of the person-at-the-helm—the president of a country! In the same way that a corporate social responsibility effort of a corporation can only be successful if the president of the company is the one driving it to success.

To those who feel barraged about Sen. Legarda’s climate change advocacy, it feels like that only because of our inability to positively respond to her calls.

To love Mother Earth requires a lot of sacrifice (that’s why it lacks popularity among humans beings). We all need to gather enough determination to stop talking and start doing.

It is not too late to wake up to the reality: our country, the Philippines is a tropical country that holds a front-row seat to typhoons and earthquakes, possibly tsunamis from the Pacific. We are as vulnerable as the word can get. It will be worse for our children if we don’t stop our selfishness and laziness.

We often blame our lawmakers for “not doing anything” but, how about our own efforts in curbing excessive carbon emissions, segregating trash or planting trees? To say the least, when we hear of a move to push for direct investment on renewable energy in our local communities, we misinterpret it as the government or corporations taking over our “territories.”

Climate change is not an issue that one man, woman or one group can address. Much as it has ravaged our country and our people’s lives already, it is a battle that can only be won by collective, cooperative and pro-active unison.

In grade school around the early 1990s, I learned about greenhouse gases trapped in the earth’s atmosphere because of a depleted ozone layer. Then, I learned from books that glacial layers in the Polar Regions are melting and can flood the whole planet.

These lessons are making sense to me only now, in 2009, which is why the time to act is today.

Climate Change, welcome to Manila

Global warming is real, climate change is taking its full course. We are now reaping the fruits of our irresponsibility and carelessness towards nature. Nature is striking back, real hard.

It was easy to ignore the cries of Mother Nature when we are so preoccupied with work, money and family. "Why should I care about saving the earth, when I can't even stop worrying how to feed my family?", "Who cares about global warming, I am working my ass off just to get and enjoy all these luxuries...".

Then came Ondoy, he brought waters to wash away our homes, steal our livelihoods and claim lives. Then came Pepeng to second the motion, bringing more destruction than its cousin Ondoy.

How long should we Filipinos be ambivalent to this issue that we are looking face to face right at this very moment? Climate change is here, there's work to be done.

This blog was created to bring you the latest news about global warming and climate change and its effects on our beloved country, the Philippines.

Go Green or Die? The choice is yours...