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.
