Rain and bamboo shoots

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.”

Read more...