Prepared: A standby rescue boat hanging along a street in Marikina, a suburb of Manila, in case of floods. — AFP
FROM her house in a Manila suburb, Rowena Jimenez can’t see the bare mountains around the built-up city. But she feels the impact of deforestation every time her living room floods.
Slash-and-burn farming, illegal logging, open-pit mining and development fuelled by population growth have stripped the once-densely forested Philippines of much of its trees.
In Manila, where more than 13 million people live, low-lying areas are often inundated when storms lash the Sierra Madre mountain range, which lies east of the city and acts as a barrier to severe weather.
But without enough trees to help absorb the rain, huge volumes of water run off the slopes and into waterways that flow into the metropolis, turning neighbourhoods into disease-infested swamps.
Jimenez, 49, has lost count of the number of times the Marikina river has broken its banks and flooded the ground floor of her family’s two-bedroom concrete house, a few blocks from the water’s edge.
“There is fear that it will happen again,” said Jimenez, who lives with her husband, youngest daughter, sister, nephew and mother.
“Your heart sinks because you realise the things you worked hard to buy will be destroyed again.”
Jimenez blames environmental “abuses” upstream in the nearby Upper Marikina River Basin – a catchment spanning roughly 26,000ha in the southern foothills of the Sierra Madre.
Only 2.1% of the watershed was covered by dense “closed forest” in 2015, according to a World Bank report.
Runoff from the mountains drains into the basin, which is critical for regulating water flow into Manila. It was declared a “protected landscape” in 2011 by then-president Benigno Aquino, under a law aimed at ensuring “biological diversity and sustainable development”.
That was two years after Typhoon Ketsana, known in the Philippines as Tropical Storm Ondoy, had submerged 80% of the city and killed hundreds of people.
But by then, many of the trees in the catchment had been cleared to make way for public roads, parking lots, private resorts and residential subdivisions.
Jimenez still shudders at the memory of the water reaching 7m-high and forcing her family to huddle on the roof of their house.
“We didn’t salvage anything but ourselves,” she said.
The combination of development in the catchment and wetter storms caused by climate change have exacerbated flooding in Manila, said Rex Cruz, a watershed management expert at the University of the Philippines.
“The surface of the Marikina watershed is not able to absorb a lot of rainwater,” he said. This also leads to water shortages.
Cruz said the situation will worsen if “business as usual prevails” in the country, which is ranked among the most vulnerable nations to the impacts of climate change.
Official data show “closed forest” cover in the archipelago – which has a total land area of 30 million ha – declined from 2.56 million ha in 2003 to 1.93 million in 2010.
It rose to 2.22 million ha in 2020.
Protecting existing forests and replanting others are made difficult by corruption and sometimes violent conflict over land ownership and usage. — AFP
