‘Mutual defense pact’ against killer climate

BALI — Two events sobered the mostly Asians attending the two-day Second World Ecological Safety Assembly (WESA) in this resort paradise. First was Asia’s boxing pride Manny Pacquiao’s unexpected knockout by Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez. More troubling was news streaming in about super Typhoon Pablo in the Philippines. Reports as of Monday were that floods and mudslides had killed 647 people, with 900 still missing and billions of pesos in crops ruined in Mindanao and the Visayas. Not only Filipinos but other Asians in attendance too reflected on the fact that there’s just no stopping the intensifying climactic crises.

Worsening killer disasters have been pounding Asia in the past two decades. Earthquake in Aceh, central China and Japan. Tsunami and monsoon floods in Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Drought and consequent forest and prairie fires in Borneo, India and Australia. Desertification in west and north China.

Western lands too have been victims of killer weather. Heat waves have been searing Russia. Mediterranean summers are now nine degrees hotter than usual. The United States has been suffering scorching summers that lead to fires, and bitter cold winters that bust water supplies. Weeks ago yet another mega-hurricane struck the American East Coast. Despite the US government’s accurate storm tracking and disaster preparedness, still close to 200 people died, and 17 mainland states severely were affected.

Environment experts and government leaders attribute the weather disturbances to global warming. Such rise in Earth temperature is brought about largely by heat inducing industrialization and forest depletion. Making matters worse are the rapid conversion of lush rural greenery into urban sprawls, underground water extraction for metropolises, and more and more polluting power plants, transports and lifestyles.

The threat of all this, bottom line, is food scarcity. Thousands of rivers are drying up in Asia and Africa and, coupled with rising ocean temperatures, are depleting natural food supplies. Since the ’80s it has been predicted that future wars will be fought not over territory but water and food.

The 500 or so WESA participants are well versed with climate change. Most know that Typhoon Pablo was atypical. On average two-dozen howlers strike Luzon and eastern Visayas each year, but Mindanao usually is spared. The huge island is below the normal typhoon path, thus attracting agricultural-export investments in pineapple, Cavendish banana, and mango. Typhoon visits Mindanao only about once a decade. But it has become too frequent for comfort in the last decade. Only last year 1,600 people perished in Mindanao floods and landslides brought about by one such tropical disturbance named Sendong. And now Pablo.

Severe climate catastrophes recognize no national boundaries. Rich and poor countries suffer calamities with increasing frequency. And yet governments have been to slow to join hands in common action. It was with a sense of urgency that former Philippine Speaker José de Venecia Jr. exhorted the WESA participants to sign a new international treaty. He called it a “mutual defense pact,” not against any country or terror group, but to stop climate deprivation.

Too, de Venecia called on the world leaders and technocrats at the WESA to put “climate justice” at the top of critical concerns. The harsh effects of climate change on the lives, welfare and health of the poorer half the world’s population is such that it has become an ethical issue. “We must manifest strong political will to defend people of the world against hunger and backslide to poverty,” de Venecia said.

Though the most applauded, de Venecia’s idea wasn’t new. He had broached the “mutual defense for ecology” to China as far back as 2003. (Two weeks ago the new leadership of the Chinese Communist Party declared climate change as an utmost interest.) De Venecia heads the International Conference of Asian Political Parties, consisting of 318 member-parties from 52 countries in the continent. As such, he proposed the same “mutual defense” to ICAPP colleagues in a meeting in Azerbaijan in September, and then to Latin American counterparts in caucus in Mexico in October.

Calling de Venecia the “Asian guru,” former Canadian deputy PM Sheila Copps immediately seconded the “defense pact.” Why is it easier for nations to wage wars of common destruction than to fight the common enemy of climate change, she intoned? As supportive was Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 66th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, and UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations. De Venecia’s proposal was set to be included in the WESA joint statement to be released Tuesday night.

Also speaking before the WESA was de Venecia’s wife, Pangasinan congresswoman Gina de Venecia. Climate change is for her an issue close to home. Only months before running for the first time for public office in 2010, typhoon had ravaged her district, and thousands lost their homes to floods. Collapsed levees let loose the swollen river waters, she recounted, and her scientific solution was to plant the repaired dikes with vetiver grass. Native to Southeast Asia and used intensively in India, the grass variety grows sturdy meter-long roots that mesh the soil together.

A number of Indochinese female participants acknowledged the value of vetiver in their own flood-controls. Congresswoman Gina is president of the Philippine Association of Women Legislators.

Environmentalist-moderator James Powell noted that in his United States more work is achieved when women participate.

That could hold true in the Philippines too. From Manila came the news that Senator Loren Legarda had delivered a privilege speech tracing the causes of Typhoon Pablo’s high casualty count. It was simple ignorance of basic geography, she said. Filipinos have high awareness about climate change, yet are oblivious to its dreadful effects. This is seen in how the poorest folk live in the most dangerous zones: on river and hillsides. A government policy should be crafted, Legarda suggested, to compel local governments to include geo-hazard mapping in development planning. Governors and mayors need not start from scratch; the Mines and Geosciences Bureau already has drawn maps of flood- and mudslide-prone areas in each of the country’s 42,027 barangays.

Geo-hazard mapping helps in disaster prevention and mitigation as well. Legarda cited the case of thickly populated Barangay Cunsad in Alimodian town, Iloilo. A super-typhoon destroyed farms, roads and bridges last July. But unlike in Marikina and Cainta Cities in 2009 and Cagayan de Oro and Iligan Cities in 2011, no lives were lost in Cunsad. For, prior to disaster, the mayor had worked to relocate the residents in the danger areas pinpointed in the MGB geo-hazard map.

Another news item came in from Doha, Qatar, to warm the hearts of WESA participants here. Nearly 200 countries have agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions of industrial countries. Although the two-week UN conference limited itself to only 15 percent of global emissions, it alerted developing countries on which of the rich ones they should nag for a cleaner, greener world.

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