AS Typhoon Lando (international code name Koppu) mercilessly battered northern Luzon on Monday, a crucial climate conference commenced in Bonn, Germany. Members of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform, where countries negotiate about a climate agreement before the 21st Conference of Parties (COP) in Paris in December, started to wrap up negotiations to find effective ways to stop global warming.
The COP is a yearly meeting of countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that hopes to solve the climate crisis. The result of the last five days of negotiations in Bonn is very important as it will set the tone of whether Paris will be a success. The negotiations will either set a strong foundation or a shaky ground for a new climate agreement.
In the last few years, a number of catastrophic events have happened because of climate change: Severe drought in California and elsewhere; destructive super typhoons like Yolanda (international code name Haiyan) in the Philippines; extreme heat in India; and extreme rains and floods in many parts of the world. Hopefully, these will serve as warning signs for world leaders to start acting on climate change. A legally binding deal in Paris will be crucial to mitigate the damage that extreme weather events could inflict on vulnerable countries like the Philippines.
As climate negotiators in Bonn are busy debating over the appropriate words to use in the agreement, Filipinos up north are agonizing over the loss of people’s lives, properties and crops. As we go to press, Lando’s death toll has risen to 30, and damage to agriculture was estimated at P6 billion.
That Lando came to ravage the Philippines on the day that a global climate forum was convened in Bonn serves as a grim reminder for world leaders. It should remind them that the deadliest Philippine typhoon—Yolanda—recorded in modern history, killing at least 6,300 people, happened during the COP Warsaw negotiations in 2013.
Yolanda’s fury prompted former climate-change commissioner and negotiator Naderev Saño to take the floor and deliver an impassioned speech in Warsaw: “We can take drastic action now to ensure that we prevent a future where super typhoons are a way of life. Because we refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where super typhoons like Haiyan become a fact of life,” Saño said.
Indeed, the whole world refuses to accept a future where super typhoons become a fact of life. Climate disasters like Yolanda are grim reminders that we are all responsible for the planet’s destruction and environmental degradation, and we are probably approaching the point of no return. We have to change our ways, and we have to change them now. For our climate negotiators, they must move faster than the sea-level rise. Otherwise, we will continue to suffer the consequences of longer and more severe droughts and other extreme weather conditions that will bring heavier loss and greater damage all over the world.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano