Once again, a fierce typhoon, this time Pablo, reminds us that climate change is real.

Before natural law began to punish mankind for abusing Nature, Mindanao was supposed to be some kind of paradise weatherwise. It may have been the site of Muslim rebellions but typhoons never visited it. Now, it suffers the fury of typhoons just like the other parts of our country.

Thank God the nation has shown preparedness. National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) officials are more or less happy with the level of preparedness in the provinces Pablo has devastated.

It’s sad that up to 238 Filipinos, as of Wednesday afternoon, have died. As Pablo continues on its path from Mindanao to the Visayas and Palawan before exiting our country, there may be more deaths.

We are not sure if later and more thorough reports would show that some of Pablo’s victims died because of landslides. Maybe not because Pablo’s winds were the more fearsome of its effects and not heavy rains.

But we wish today to remind our authorities and our countrymen that the drive to forbid people from settling in landslide areas must continue.

Save people from landslides
The government—national and local—simply must prohibit human settlement in landslide-prone areas.

And the families now living in these areas must be relocated to safer ground.

The government must not just prohibit people from building houses or setting up shanties in areas that everyone knows are sure to have a landslide again. The government must also use its police forces to bar people from reaching these dangerous places and build their shanties in them.

These are areas that are near mines, cliffs and other places that the mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) have identified.

Earlier this year, the death toll in Barangay Napnapan, Pantukan, Compostela Valley, which was also hit by Pablo, reached three scores. Families looked and finally gave up on trying to recover relatives who got buried in mud.

At that time, Senator Loren Legarda s[poke sadly about that part of Compostela Valley having been visited by landlsides before. And yet, people still settled there after the rains stopped.

“We should make use of the geo-hazard maps to determine hazard-prone areas and prohibit settlement in such places. As many would certainly ignore the call since they would have no other place to go to, the government must strictly enforce its policies and initiate the relocation of families in landslide-prone areas not only in Compostela Valley but all over the country before they are all engulfed by the very place they call home,” the Senator stressed then.

Government agencies concerned should use landslide susceptibility and hazard maps to effectively keep out people from dangerous places. Since many, especially the poor who have become squatters, disregard warnings, then the government’s men in uniform must be employed to force people to act for the good of their families and obey government warnings.

Riverbank and sandbar island settlements
Sendong’s fury also caused deaths in Cagayan de Oro. There officials allowed people build and live in houses and shacks on riverbanks and on a sandbar island. That permissiveness was nothing less than criminal.

In Cagayan de Oro and Misamis Oriental, local officials had been warned that the kind of disaster that came with Sendong would happen. The warnings were not only those from the local and international weather forecasters—that Sendong was going to dump even more rain per minute than Ondoy did two years ago. The Mines and Geosciences Bureau, which has been making maps of areas vulnerable to flooding and other disasters, had also warned the local officials, years before and again in 2010 and 2011, that their cities’ riverbanks populated by squatters in the tens of thousands and islands like Isla de Oro would be swept away and disintegrate.

The MGB warned repeatedly that, once the rivers swell because of unusually heavy and fast rainfall, these people and their shanties on the riverbanks and on the sandbar islands would be swept away.
The local officials, however, did not pay attention.

And Mr. Death came.

If these reminders are not heeded, God forbid, next year when heavy rains and fierce typhoons come our way again, there will be more helpless weeping.

Diseases brought by climate change
Another thing that has been happening as a result of climate change—and its global warming effect—is the emergence of new mutations of killer diseases.

Global warming has made disease carrying insects and bugs to reproduce in great multiples than normal. They now thrive in areas that were too cold for them in times past.

For instance, The World Health Organization (WHO) says dengue cases have risen alarmingly in Australia, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines. And our country has been having the most dengue cases since 2011 and most likely next year.