It is tragic that a few days before Christmas, most parts of the Visayas and portions of Mindanao as well as Palawan suffered another nature’s fury with the onslaught of tropical storm “Odette” late last week.
Viewing the captured videos and photos of the storm’s impacts shared online was depressing, especially since the damages to properties and agriculture are severe while several lives were lost.
Heavy flooding occurred in pathways of the storm, and whistling winds blew rooftops and destroyed houses and other infrastructures. Floodwaters inundated many urban centers since heavy rain continuously poured for quite a time starting at night of December 16 to early in the morning of the following day.
As of this time, relief and recovery efforts are still underway as many were rendered homeless by the storm, and the scarcity of drinking water and food is evident. Power and communications are still down in most affected areas because electrical posts and transmission lines were toppled down, too.
There are areas that remain isolated and news blackout as mobility is similarly affected due to blocking of fallen trees along major road networks.
The miseries brought by Typhoon “Odette” have compounded the already difficult situation we are still in due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the number of virus contamination is declining, the pandemic is not over yet as new variants of coronavirus continue to evolve. The government has started to ease quarantine and other health protocols, and many of us are hoping that this Christmas will be entirely different from last year.
At the height of the pandemic in 2020, Christmas gatherings were discouraged or even prohibited, and the celebration of Christmas and New Year was confined to household members who were living together.
While the mass gathering is not yet advisable, the easing of restrictions has created a semblance of “normality” among us, and our communities.
With the rollout of various vaccines against COVID-19, a number of us are hoping to be reunited merrily with our dearly missed families, relatives, and friends during this holiday season. Unfortunately, the devastation brought by the wrath of typhoon Odette is making our situation bleak, as it created another atmosphere of uncertainty to the already uncertain times due to the pandemic.
The health and environment and climate challenges we face are extremely dangerous. In fact, numerous experts have already claimed we are now in a state of global health and climate crises. The changing climatic pattern of the world continues to manifest extreme and deadly weather conditions, like super typhoons, hurricanes, tornados, storm surges, and other hazards. The increasing temperature of the Earth brings this, or what we call global warming, due to excessive carbon emissions released in the atmosphere, among other factors.
The Philippines has been identified as one of the vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change since the country is located in one of the hazardous zones of the world, and given our geographic features composed of numerous islands that are exposed to open seas. Typhoon “Odette” was not our first encounter with natural hazards because several others already happened in the past, like the super typhoon Yolanda.
Compounding the issue of natural hazards and risks is the deteriorating and bad state of the country’s natural ecosystems, from forest to coastal and marine ecosystems. If only our ecosystems are in good condition, they could help mitigate the impacts of natural hazards and risks.
The abuse of nature has similarly created the COVID-19 and other pandemics that occurred in the past. Scientific investigations showed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is the cause of the COVID-19 disease, was sourced from a wildlife species, most likely bats that are host to different coronaviruses. Virus contamination usually occurs from wildlife and human interactions. It was claimed that the current virus emanated from a wet market in Wuhan, China, where wildlife trading existed before the pandemic.
The Earth is the only known planet, to date, to host us, people. It provided and is still providing almost everything we basically need. However, human interventions and manipulations have rendered the excessive alterations of our natural world, to the extent that the Earth’s natural capacities to control occurrences and changes in the environment could no longer withstand. Here we are now, facing nature’s wraths of pandemics and calamities.*