Rainy season, La Nina and disasters

admin June 20, 2010 Personal Notes, Urban Planning 41 Comments

The PAGASA recently announced that the rainy season is here. It is a good news to many – an indication that water basins would be replenished anytime soon to ensure sustained supply of water specifically for irrigation and power generation. The rainy season brings promise to farmers who suffered income and production losses due to intense drought for the past 3 to 4 months. If rains come moderately during the planting and growing periods especially for rice and corn farmers, our farmers could hope for a good harvest by the end of the year. Hence, even if they’ve suffered losses early this year, they could somehow look forward to some farm incomes for the rest of the year.

Rainy season also means uninterrupted power supply for industrial, commercial and domestic uses. With sufficient amount of water in dams and reservoirs, our hydrothermal plants could continuously generate the required electrical power supply necessary for normal production, business and trade operations.

The catch is that this year’s rainy season would be a La Nina period as well. This implies extreme weather disturbance characterized by excessive rains and frequent visit of tropical cyclones, storm surges and depression. Being a La Nina period, the probability, intensity and magnitude of these climatic and meteorological events would be greater than during normal and regular rainy season. Natural calamities could then be expected, foremost of which are landslides and floods. I just hope that when these events happen, they won’t be in a scale of a disaster anymore like what Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng brought to Metro Manila and other surrounding areas late last year.

Dealing with disaster is not something new in the Philippines, but the focus has recently shifted from disaster and relief to disaster risk preparedness, reduction and mitigation. Just before the announcement of the rainy season this year, RA 10121 – the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2010 was issued. This new law seeks to strengthen the Philippine disaster risk reduction and management system providing for the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Framework (NDRRMF), and institutionalizing the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan (NDRRMP). Last year, RA 9729 – the Climate Change Act of 2009 – was passed which laid the foundation for the institutionalization of mechanisms to respond to the challenges of climate change in the Philippines.

Looking at these two (2) recent pieces of legislation, some new rules and institutional arrangements are being put in place to scale up work to address possible effects of natural occurrences and events (as main stimuli for disasters) and climate change (as the aggravating stimulus for disasters). All possible areas of concern have been taken into consideration, such as the policy and institutional frameworks; the knowledge, research, science and technology aspects of disaster risk preparedness and mitigation at all levels; information and education campaign most particularly at the local levels; financing priority interventions and actions; and private and public partnership and collaborative mechanisms for disaster risk preparedness.

What had been missed out is the concept of risk financing and insurance, although RA 10121 already provides for the ex-ante use of national and local calamity funds, allowing the financing of disaster risk mitigation, preparedness and prevention activities. Yet, risk financing and insurance is more than the concept of calamity fund utilization provided in the RA. The former is important because, historically, natural disasters have had grave social and economic consequences costing an average of P19.7 billion between 1990 and 2006, which is equivalent to about 0.5 percent of our annual GDP. These figures are a bit misleading; for example, typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng caused P206 million in damages, or roughly 10 times the annual average. As records would show, these natural calamities consistently destroy the few assets of the poor, undermine the already weak national and local infrastructure, and periodically leave millions without access to basic urban services for months.

The post-disaster funds available for recovery and reconstruction for both private and public are quite meager. A simple comparison and computation of funding allocations available from all government and private sector sources of disaster risk financing for losses and damage caused by the 2009 typhoons reveals that they could cover only 1.5 percent of total economic damages and about 3 percent of total public sector disaster recovery and reconstruction needs. This only means that the residual economic loss (roughly 95 percent) was mostly absorbed by owners of destroyed assets such as the homeowners, SMEs, and farmers. In the case of the public sector infrastructure damages, the insufficiency of funds resulted in inadequate repairs and maintenance of these facilities.

To respond to these risk financing and insurance needs (and we can continue to talk about them in succeeding issues), there is a need to review the following areas: (a) effectiveness and responsiveness of existing public insurance schemes; (b) local government post disaster safety nets; (c) private sector post disaster assistance; and (d) the possibility and feasibility of establishing a catastrophe insurance pool or strengthening the disaster cost transfer schemes available in the country.

When all these things are put in place – policy, institutional and financial mechanisms to respond to disaster risk management, we can surely secure ourselves from disasters. It’s a long way to go, but we should be on our way!

Feel free to send your comments to nic_agustin@yahoo.com.

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