Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Disaster

ILOILO CITY--The First Philippine International River Summit in Iloilo City opened with rationale presentation by the organizers of the event led by the Iloilo City Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog shortly before lunch on May 30, 2012 at the Grand Ballroom of Centennial Resort Hotel and Convention Center, this city.

Right after lunch the participants broke up into various groups to listen to a variety of lectures by local and international experts on environmental research,  river management, disaster risk reduction and management (drrm) and others.

I joined the group that preferred the topic on  drrm. One speaker that caught my attention was an American who claimed to have worked on drrm  for almost four decades now. He recalled some natural tragedies that caught international attention which included the tsunami in Indonesia, a flood in Fiji, a flood in Aceh, lahar mudflow in Pampangga, Ondoy, Sendong, etc, etc. “One common denominator in all of these,” he said was that “the people in these areas were not prepared.” 

In the case of the Philippines, he lashed at the ningas cogon attitude of Filipinos to explain the level of preparedness (unpreparedness to be exact) of our people to the challenges of drrm in particular and to climate change in general. He said we are eager to talk about disaster prevention and mitigation and preparedness usually right after a disaster strikes us. But later our eagerness subsides especially when we feel that its possibility of recurrence is not imminent. 

LGUs usually complain that we can not be adequately prepared because of funds constraints. But when calamity strikes, we wonder how we are able to muster a  lot of financial, logistical and moral support for our victims and the rehabilitation of devastated communities which expenses far exceed the resources that could have been allocated for mitigation and preparedness. 

After his talk, I asked myself: are the communities I work with now prepared for disasters like flood, landslide  and earthquake?

The answer to my own question brought me to the  realization that the country does not lack human and material resources to address the challenges of climate change. What we basically lack I think is the will  to combat the worst disaster that has inflicted our national psyche: complacency.

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