The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) predicts La Niña, which we have been experiencing since late last year, will continue for the first four months of 2011. That means, according to Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa), the usually hot and dry summer in the Philippines will be more likely rainy, with a brief sunny interval in April and the first week of May.
With this extreme weather comes high economic and social cost: in addition to damage to agriculture, infrastructure and property, the heavy rains and torrential floods have already taken 42 lives, and displaced almost 1.3 million Filipinos from their homes.
A recent policy note published by the Philippine Institute for Developmental Studies (PIDS) approximates that the economic cost of disasters in the Philippines between the years 1990 and 2009 reached $4,813 million (P223,813 million), or an annual average of $240.7 million (P11,193 million).
According to its author, Dr. Danilo Isreal, PIDS senior research fellow, these figures are a conservative estimate, because only the direct costs of disasters, such as damaged property and lost earnings, were used to compute the losses. Its consequences, or the indirect costs, such as increases in the prices of agricultural goods, have been excluded and could significantly expand the number.
The study also indicated the increasing frequency of disasters in the Philippines, as well as the number of people affected by them. There were more disasters (132) between the years 2000 and 2009 than the earlier decade (96), with 49.8 million people affected in the former and 35.2 million in the latter.
Given the growing number of weather-related disasters and their impact on our society, investing in disaster management should thus be a national priority, an imperative. The PIDS policy note showed a high benefit-cost ratio in the experience of Southeastern Europe in improving its national meteorological and hydrological service. The policy note also pointed out the transboundary nature of weather events, and that regional integration and strong cooperation is necessary to be more effective and efficient in monitoring them.
We have allocated funds for the modernization of Pagasa, as well as for the creation of the Philippine Disaster Science Center (DSC) in the 2011 national budget. Let’s see if there is wisdom and will in the sitting administration.
The past floods have shown the inadequacy of Pagasa’s equipment in forecasting weather events, and the need for more Doppler radars and additional buoys.
Doppler radars can make forecasting models more accurate because they detect the wind motions (direction and speed) in the air, allowing forecasters to peer inside a thunderstorm before it hits land. Buoys, on the other hand, are floating devices in the ocean that detect the height and speed of ocean current and provide the necessary data to gauge rainfall. Early this year, Pagasa announced the construction of a Doppler radar in Aparri, Cagayan, which is part of the P500-million Japan International Cooperation Agency grant to Pagasa.
The DSC will serve as Southeast Asia’s hub for disaster science, and provide us with the best science-based synthesis of disaster information, including grid-computing models that fit real-time data, forecasting of disasters based on recent records and new instrumentation. We will greatly benefit from satellite and the modeling resources that other countries will contribute to the DSC, which complements the measurement expertise that we will develop in the country.
The DSC will also help improve the skills of our meteorologists and scientists by providing them with a home base for regional disaster prediction, which will facilitate a multidisciplinary R&D approach and provide avenues for international collaboration.
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