Cities becoming stressful

A recent international poll by the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Manila as one of the toughest places in the world to live, making it one of the least “livable” cities in the world. It is 108th in the list and shares bottom ranking, with cities like New Delhi, Cairo, Mumbai, Nairobi and Lusaka. The survey ranks the livability of cities according to five factors — health care, stability, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.

To me, all these factors that determine the living conditions as appropriate for humans in cities are now governed by one common driving force – the state of the environment. We cannot ever be so overdriven about the damaging impact of environment degradation and abuse now that we are already feeling the negative effects of climate change. In Asia, we witnessed unusual rainstorms and tsunamis, abnormal flooding and inundation due to rising water levels, severe droughts in once fertile farmlands. In the Philippines, more rains or less rains can now be both disastrous for agricultural lands in that both can lead to less harvest yields, with crops damaged by floods or drought. In many streets of Manila, we experience immediate flooding with the slightest of rain leading us to think it is either the land is sinking or the water levels are rising or both. We find flooding even in other progressive cities in the provinces where before there was none at all. Some of our cities, on the other hand, experience severe droughts like never before. There was a report of severe drought in 2004 in T’boli, Cotabato, considered the country’s worst drought in 50 years that had affected around 700,000 people, with people forced to subsist on food foraged from the forest. There were similar cases of drought experienced in Davao in recent years; hopefully, the situation has improved in these areas. 

The present state of all these cities makes them either easy or difficult to live in, and with the growing effects of climate change, more and more cities are becoming life-threatening for human beings. In fact, the World Health Organization reports that 150,000 people die every year as a result of climate change and environment degradation, apart from the casualties brought by worsening calamities. 

Tomorrow, the United Nations observes “The World Day to Combat Desertification” to highlight the urgent need to curb the processes of DLDD —desertification, land degradation and drought, which according to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification website threatens human security by depriving people of the quality of life – by taking away food, access to water, the means for economic activities, and even their homes. In worst-case scenarios, these lead to more diseases, undermine national and regional security, force people to leave their homes and trigger low- or high-intensity conflicts among peoples in communities. This year’s theme is “Conserving land and water = securing our future”.    

Despite being an archipelago of islands surrounded by waters, the Philippines has been cited to be a “desertification in the making”. Thirty-five years ago, we had some 16 million hectares of rainforests. Recent studies show that today, barely 2.8 percent remain. Our forests continue to vanish at the rate of 25 hectares per hour every day of the week, or about 200,000 hectares a year! This compounds the worsening problem of air pollution, another factor that contributes to the un-livability of more and more cities.

Now we have reason to say that the impact of environment degradation and climate change is our biggest security threat. If there is nothing done about this, not only will our cities become un-livable, we may one day see our country an empty and desolate land minus the birds, the trees and the flowing rivers. We call the attention of the men vying for the highest position in the land to show their agenda on this particular issue.