Last week’s march in the streets of New York was the biggest climate demonstration in recent memory. Will the message of more than 400,000 people who joined, and hundreds of thousands if not millions more in other parts of the world, be enough for key decision-makers to take the much needed drastic moves to reduce our carbon emissions at all levels?
Climate effects had brought in more damage and losses to us and those most susceptible than other countries in the North, which have stronger system, resources and capacity to respond to disasters. Far too many precious lives had been lost and billions of pesos of damages incurred to ecosystems, properties and definitely quality of lives. Millions had been displaced from their homes and livelihoods and more will be. Our planet is heating up fast yet largely we still pretend that there is no problem.UN Secretary General Ban Kee Moon and Leonardo DiCaprio walked in the historic NY march.
DiCaprio, recently designated UN Messenger of Peace and a strong consistent voice in marine conservation, spoke before the leaders attending the UN Climate Summit last week and summed up the appalling global inaction on the issue:
“As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems. I believe humankind has looked at Climate Change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that Climate Change wasn’t real…”
Despite the increasing number and severity of typhoons, floods, landslides, and droughts, in various parts of our world, have we bothered to look at the root cause of this massive problem that humanity’s addiction to gas, oil and coal have helped create?
Has the urgent need for solutions to the climate crisis permeated each of our minds and hearts? Have we been willing to lessen the fossil-fuel addiction habits, opted for energy efficiency, reduce and managed ecologically the used resources and aimed to improve the health of our life support systems?
We are not lacking in the laws and policies to stabilize our climate, restore ecological integrity, lessen biodiversity loss, and reduce and mitigate effects of climate change. Like a festering self-inflicted wound, it is a slow process to rise above our comfort zones, opt for alternative solutions, simplify our existence and be closer to nature.
The four-minute speech of President Aquino during the UN Summit lacked the fire that should have emanated from a leader of a highly impacted country which almost a year ago this November suffered the brunt of the mighty typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. He seemed to even create the impression that we are on the road to renewable energy revolution, like what Germany and Spain are doing.
His mention of our Renewable Energy Law was merely for rhetoric as we know very well how painfully slow the transition to renewable energy has been effected in this tropical archipelago of 7, 107 islands.
It must be so difficult to be forceful before the international community, when your own energy advisers have successfully embarked on pushing for the ludicrous policy of adding 15 more polluting and climate change-causing coal power plants in the country. This, despite laws that require mainstreaming of climate change impacts and disaster risk reduction, and with the climate change policy-making body, the silent Climate Change Commission, seemingly at a loss for words in this uncanny development.
This disheartening bias for more coal power plants will surely add up to the total global carbon concentration in the atmosphere and the dangerous consequences we are and will be experiencing, not to mention aggravate the health and other life-threatening impacts of polluting carbon emissions to the lives of the people and our ecosystems.
We live in a country where a very weak enforcement of environmental and accountability laws is recognized, where data and information are not accessible, facilities for monitoring leave much to be desired and upgrading skills for research capability is still not prioritized especially at the local level.
I long for the day when monitoring of the projects’ impacts on water, sea, fish and marine resources, wildlife, air, health and our climate are sincerely done and released to the public.
Pending such analysis and review of the cumulative impacts of projects in decision–making, the installation of more coal power plants, some even in protected areas, is certainly a serious cause for alarm. Cumulative impacts are defined as “changes to the biophysical, social, economic, and cultural environments caused by the combination of past, present and reasonably foreseeable future actions.” (https: // www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/ 1100100023828/ 1100100023830))