THE Philippines has always been a country of just two seasons—hot and wet.
In 2018 the weather has been a bit, well…weird. The cool weather that normally bids adieu in early March stayed until just past Holy Week in the first week of April. That’s normally when the hot weather is at its peak. Making a grand entrance in almost mid-April, the heat made its presence felt and boy, was it hot! It was so hot that a lot of my golf buddies, who are normally quite resilient to fluctuations in temperature and weather, opted to put down their clubs until the weather took a turn toward cooler times.
Then over the weekend without any fanfare, the rains came. Did they ever. It rained so hard that golf games everywhere got rained out. The city of Tagaytay, normally impassable on weekends due to the sheer volume of day tourists and passersby, was eerily quiet. Bad for business but good for the locals who normally seek refuge in areas away from their home.
It seems ironic that a country that receives as much rainfall as the Philippines would suffer from water shortages, but here we are. The golf courses of Cavite suffered much in the summer of 2018. Normally lush green fairways turned a parched shade of brown. Most golf courses had tough choices to make. Most chose to let the fairways suffer the brunt of the effects of the drought while continuing to water the tee boxes and greens complexes.
The water issues seem confined to the Cavite golf courses. We saw golf courses from Pampanga in the North down to Batangas in the South and none of them were hit as badly as the golf courses in Cavite. The Orchard Golf and Country Club beset by management issues was perhaps the hardest hit. The Riviera Golf and Country Club suffered also but good management was able to mitigate the effects of drought. Not all were so badly hit, as Sherwood Hills came out of it seemingly unscathed. But it begs the question of why the province suffers so while others are seemingly unaffected.
The province of Cavite draws much of its ground water from the six watersheds that feed the aquifers below ground that form the stores of the province’s fresh water. These are the Bacoor River watershed, the Imus River watershed, the San Juan River watershed, the Cañas River watershed, the Labac River watershed and the Maragondon River watershed.
All the watersheds are located in the area just north of the Tagaytay ridgeline. The Bacoor, Imus and San Juan River watersheds all empty into Bacoor Bay and the others into Manila Bay. The watersheds trap a good deal of the rainwater and surface runoff and channel it through the earth into aquifers that store vast quantities of it.
The source that feeds the aquifers is rainfall from the Tagaytay ridge, which receives the greatest amount of rainfall in the province. A lot of the water makes its way into the earth and down to the aquifers while the surface runoff moves downhill, where it makes it to the rivers and empties into the bay. The Tagaytay ridge has been developed quite heavily in the last decade with no end to the process in sight. The development prevents rainfall from seeping into the ground and to the aquifers. Most of it now runs off the surface, into the rivers and out through the bays.
Meanwhile, the population of Cavite is growing at unprecedented rates. The population almost doubled in a span of 15 years between 2000 and 2015. However, it should be noted that the rate the population is increasing has abated and that the population in Cavite is now in decline. It reached its peak until 2010 and is, on the average, in decline. But that statistic might be deceiving because in certain local government units (LGU), the population is still on the up.
The fastest-growing LGU is Trece Martires City, followed by the city of Imus, the municipality of Carmona and city of General Trias. These areas are still experiencing in-migration due to the continuous development of settlements and industrial areas. Trece Martires City is home to many low-cost housing projects funded by the national government.
The pressures that the sudden increase in population placed upon the province’s resources was great, perhaps too great for the water supply to cope. The unregulated proliferation of deep wells and water-supply businesses continues to do damage. These wells are having to go deeper and deeper into the ground to find supplies of potable water, a sure sign that the aquifers are being depleted. This spells very bad news for the province’s burgeoning population.
This also greatly affects the viability of the province’s golf courses. Cavite is home to 10 golf clubs, many of which have more than 18 holes of golf. A typical golf course requires 100,000 to 1,000,000 gallons (378.5 m3 to 3,785 m3) of water per week in summer to maintain healthy vegetation. Multiply that by the number of 18-hole golf courses in the province and that is roughly 16,000,000 gallons of water per week.
While that is a huge number, it must be noted that golf courses make far more efficient use of the water they need for the golf course. All golf courses have water segregation systems of some sort to trap surface runoff and rainfall. This allows them to recycle the runoff by trapping it in ponds for later use. Agriculture, by far, places the greatest demands on the water supply, followed by the human population. Golf courses’ water use pales in significance, but golf courses are very visible and make easy targets for conservationists that are not very well informed.
Make no mistake, this is a crisis in the making of gigantic proportions. Water is the source of all life. Without it the province of Cavite, or any other for that matter, would be nothing but a desert wasteland, uninhabitable by life as we know it.
The golf industry in Cavite needs to start planning for the future. The options are few; reduce the use of water in the club and make plans to be able to sequester enough water for the dry months. We are fortunate to be in a part of the world where rain still falls in abundance. That makes the situation manageable but only if we act now.
Everyone involved must do their part; the provincial and national governments, the industries that make the province their headquarters, the golf industry and the people of Cavite. Everyone needs to get up to speed on the situation and to do their part to alleviate the water crisis in the making. Water is our lifeblood; the earth would be unlivable without it.
Image credits: Mike Besa