The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain”, the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittte sings in the 1964 Broadway musical “ My Fair Lady.” She’d been taught to speak “proper English” by phonetics professor, Henry Higgins who casually bet that he could teach her and let her blend with London high society.
George Bernad Shaw wrote the original stage play “Pygmalion” in 1913. And in the stage version, Audrey Hepburn played Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins.
“Now once again where does it rain?” Higgins asks. “In the plain, in the plain,” the flower girl sings. “And where’s that soggy plain?” “In Spain, Spain” – some way from Sweden where the World Water Week assembly opened Monday.
Managing rain is key to eradicating poverty and hunger in drylands that anchor 44 percent of the world’s cultivated systems that barely feed 2.1 billiion people, scientists said on the opening day of the Stockholm conference.
They came from Oxford, Pacific Institute, Rockeller Foundation to Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Conference delegates flew in from 130 countries and 200 organizations
World Water Week is a week-long meeting held since 1991. It began as the Stockholm Water conference and expanded into today’s World Water Week. Earlier themes ranged from “Drainage Basin Security” in 2003, “Sanitation Issues” in 2008 to water in an urbanizing world in 2011.
“Drylands in semi-arid and subtropical climates are fragile regions where the poorest countries and most malnourished people cluster,” the scientists said. The challenge of global importance is to build capacity to tap severely underutilized rainwater. It would address an “ominous congruence”: between ill-fed populations and reliance on increasingly ‘limited unpredictable’ rain.
By 2050, “business as usual” will mean two billion small farmers to key managers “eke out a living at the mercy of rainfall that is even less reliable today due to climate change.” Sustainable management of rainwater in dry and vulnerable region has been a blind spot in previous goals and targets.
Rains today, often pour “in intense, often convective storms,” the experts’ statement adds. (These) generate flash floods and surface runoffs undermine rain-fed agriculture and traditional irrigation systems.
Setting out to eradicate poverty and hunger without harnessing “the productivity of rain is a serious and an unacceptable omission.” These human goals “cannot be achieved without a strong focus on sustainable management of rainwater…”
The task ahead is to “build resilience and raise farm yields by bringing management techniques to bear on rainwater.” These include rain water catchments, supplementary irrigation to better oversight in water use.
Factor into in any “hunger goal” a target on resilient rainwater management by improved watershed management, the scientists urged the UN General Assembly. “Set specific targets that aim for a doubling in food yield per unit of rainwater.”
Heavier and more frequent rains are likely to lash the Philippines in the years ahead, says a joint study by scholars from Oxford University, Asian Development Bank and Philippine Institute of Development Studies. Chances for storms like supertyphoon Yolanda to slam the Philippines every two years are on the upswing, due to altered weather patterns,
The authors are ADB’s independent evaluation department Vinod Thomas, Philippine Institute for Development Studies Jose Ramon Albert and Cameron Hepburn of Oxford University.
Like most parts of the globe, the Philippines has felt increasing temperatures, Pagasa notes. There have been statistically significant increasing number of hot days but decreasing number of cool nights.
During the last 60 years, maximum and minimum temperatures increased by 0.36 C and 1.0 C. There has been a slight increase in the number of tropical cyclones with maximum sustained winds greater than 150 kph and above – notably in the Visayas
More people will be at risk in Asia and the Pacific, most of them in Southeast Asia. The data underscores the need for governments “to build disaster resilience” into national growth strategies as investment.
Jacked up risks result from a confluence of three factors: rising exposure of populations, increasing vulnerabilities, and the changing nature of the hazards themselves, Philippine Institute of Development Jose Ramon Albert points out.
The heaviest toll has been inflicted on low-and lower-middle-income economies. And these catastrophes threaten otherwise dramatic progress on poverty reduction over the past three decades.
Japan plows in five percent of its gross domestic product, achieving positive benefits. “High returns are evident even in periods where spending is less.” In Bangladesh, effective warning systems and evacuation centers paid off. Dhaka reported 185 deaths in 1997 compared with the 300,000 in 1970’s storm. Give priority to forest protection as well as investment in renewable energy plus low carbon technologies.
Climate policy, at the international level is moving rapidly towards agreement an emissions pathway, and distributing responsibilities between countries, writes Oxford University’s Cameron Hepburn. A feasible framework can be constructed where each country takes on its own responsibilities, based on a shared understanding with other nations.
“Pagpatak ng ulan, tutubo ang labong, makilala na ang gagawing bumbong,” a Pilipino proverb says. “When the rain falls, bamboo shoots grow and one can tell which can be made into water tubes.”
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