With yet another one — Uwan (Fung-wong) — coming over the next 48 hours, the Philippines had already been hit by three devastating typhoons just in the last several weeks. The most recent one, Kalmaegi had unleashed Category 5 level destruction over the Visayas reason with Cebu bearing the brunt of its violent visit.
Torrential floods of unprecedented ferocity had hit Cebu causing what will likely be a humanitarian crisis that will persist for weeks. From this and the shape of the impact of this year’s typhoons, this has become the new normal.
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Unfortunately for the Philippines, tropical cyclones have, themselves, long been a normal. What has changed over the last several decades, however, is the size of the Philippines’ human population and the its physical landscape. With the ten-fold ballooning of the population of the Philippines since “independence” in 1946 and, as a result of this, the degradation of its environment to extract resources to support this growth, the manner with which water dumped onto the islands by otherwise natural weather events like monsoon rains and typhoons has changed dramatically.
The calamities we see today are effectively double-whammy outcomes of a population growth clip that all but outpaced the ability of Philippine society to manage risk. Forests and other biological features that once absorbed wind and water unleashed by weather disturbances are now largely gone, and population pressure on limited resources have pushed Filipinos to inhabit high risk areas making entire communities literally disasters waiting to happen.
The sorts of solutions that will eventually mitigate the effects of tropical typhoons in the Philippines will take lots of money and many years to build out. Money and time that could have been capitalised over the last half century had Philippine society applied proper foresight when they had the chance. A reasonable population policy plus sound land and resource management applied would have served as robust foundation for shrewd investment in infrastructure development could have been sustained.
Sadly, all is always crystal clear in hindsight. Perhaps the only recourse now is to apply the foresight that future hindsight from the next generations of Filipinos will likely call for.
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