![]() ![]() ![]() All administrations basically followed the same morning-after-the-storm ritual. It is “like dancing with the cosmos.”įor decades after independence in 1946, government responses to disasters were largely fatalistic and opportunistic. “It gives a person courage to see himself through hard times,” he said. He argued it invited risk-taking while faced with possible failure. The prominent scholar Alfredo Lagmay, who passed away in 2005, proposed a rather different interpretation of “bahala na” however. Filipinos seem to be resigned to accept nature’s wrath. One fifth are undernourished, so they are vulnerable to the health challenges of a storm’s aftermath.įilipino’s traditional attitude to calamities is best expressed by the aphorism “bahala na”, which means “let’s leave it up to God”.Slightly more than a quarter are so poor that they cannot recover material losses or repair damages.Over half the nation’s people live along coastlines, exposing them to typhoons and storm surges.This view is reinforced by Social Watch data: His grim forecast is this will continue to happen because “in the Philippines, we have an awful lot of very poor, marginalised people who have no place to go.” In his view, natural events like typhoons only become disasters when humans die. Pedro Walpole of Ateneo de Manila, a highly respected Catholic university, agrees. “Whether natural hazards turn into disasters depends not only on the intensity of an event but is also crucially determined by a society’s level of development,” says Isagani Serrano, the president of the non-governmental Rural Reconstruction Movement and a co-convenor of Social Watch Philippines. The index is compiled by an alliance of German non-governmental organisations (“Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft”) and assesses 173 countries’ exposure to natural disaster risks as well as their ability to cope. In 2017, the Philippines with 100 million people ranked third behind the Vanuatu and Tonga, two small Pacific island nations, according to the World Risk Index. Earthquakes and volcano eruptions are common too. Storms often cause severe flooding and landslides. By the time many Filipinos turn 21, they are likely to have experienced more than 200 tropical cyclones with top wind speeds of at least 118 km/h. Natural disasters are part of life in the Philippines’ over 7,000 islands. Even though they hit the archipelago regularly, natural calamities were previously seen as one-off events. Innovative legislation compels authorities in the Philippines to manage and reduce disaster risks systematically. ![]()
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