“Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster.” – Jim Wallis
A United States agency – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asserts that climate change impacts are heavily “human-induced” and a very complex issue affecting the society in many different ways. For one, drought harms food production and human health, flooding leads to spread of diseases, death, and damages ecosystems including infrastructure. They change food availability and limit human productivity affecting economic growth in general. This is the multitude and the magnitude of climate change has brought about to the world today.
SKIPPING GLOBAL CONTEXT
The agency echoes scientists’ warning, “that the planet has crossed a series of tipping points with catastrophic consequences, such as advancing permafrost (frozen sand, soil and rock) melt in the last couple of years in Arctic regions. What highlights this rapid and worsening climate change is the melting Greenland ice sheet at an unprecedented rate, with accelerating mass extinction, and the increasing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest just to name a few”.
This causes a great deal of overflow affecting all other global ecological systems contributing to its worsening state including this part of the world. The Asian region including the Philippines is ravaged by tropical storms such as hurricanes, heatwaves and frequent and intense floodings never seen and felt before. This strengthens the fact that the climate crisis is a global infamous trend in its worst pace since the commencement of the industrial revolution era that was largely human-induced reaching to a point of irreparable proportion.
SINKING ECONOMY, TERRIBLE POLITICS
In the Philippines, climate change is faced with the most complicated issue not limited within the realm of environment but intertwined with gargantuan political, social and economic burdens. Ours is almost a hapless country with an unthinkable weaponized and muddled political intramurals that is highly polarized and weaponized characterized by technical legalities thrown to the public presumed to deliver justice. Even critics of the government such as environmental advocates and civil society have joined the fray that has now turned into an immense political blame-game out of the flood control scandal. This global climate change trend has become so aggravated and is now tangled up and has gotten extremely complicated.
It spiralled into a national public outrage demanding justice, accountability and transparency seen as an inhuman political rape of the ecological system that cost human lives and properties and stolen people’s money. The narrative is now a highly political issue of weaponization resulting in polarization where pursuit of truth and justice is seen as an evasion.
ACTION VS. NARRATIVE CHANGE
At the local front, it must be reiterated that the realities in Bacolod are just a microcosm of the global and national phenomenon of ecological destruction.
Just like other localities in the country, Bacolod is highly vulnerable to disasters because of its largely flat terrain and significantly low-lying coastal areas making it a “catchbasin” to heavy rainfalls with clogged rivers, creeks, and drainage canals, notwithstanding their outdated-ness. In the past decade or so, occasional heavy rains have become “extreme rain events” and powerful bursts that the city’s old infrastructure cannot cope up with. Despite its inadequacies in resources, facilities and equipment the current leadership does its best to manage and mitigate disasters’ impacts with resoluteness.
The city’s main concern is the safety and protection of its citizens by ensuring that no human life is sacrificed as much as possible and properties’ damage are kept at a minimum while the leadership consistently encourages every Bacolodnons’ active role and partakes responsibilities in the most serious manner. Collective actions big or small matter that spontaneously form and create the true narrative. While it is more than understandable when many are affected emotions run high demanding immediate actions for relief and assistance especially by those with less capacity to recover.
This is the reality the city is engulfed in. But, when criticisms are only meant to fault-find by a loud yet small segment of the citizenry it is almost a guarantee as a product of disgruntled, biased and ill-imagined ideas framed as narrative infected by politically polarized national mudslinging. Bacolod is not a complete story of failure but a continuing written book of adaptation, resilience and commitment.
Unromanticized.*
