Why we should protect the environment
By ANGEL ALCALA
‘By not disturbing our fish populations inside marine reserves, the resiliency of coral reef ecosystem is maintained, preventing the collapse of this important ecosystem in the face of climate changes.’
he recent three typhoons that hit the country hard should jolt us out of our complacency. Weather forecasters are warning us that we have not seen the worst yet.
Those of us who have been around for sometime confirm that indeed the climate has changed a lot since the early decades of the previous (20th) century. This does not mean that there were no destructive occurrences (typhoons, for example) in the past. Our weather records in fact show that there were strong typhoons in the past. I remember a particularly bad one in the 1930s that destroyed the roof of our house in southern Negros Occidental. But the difference between then and now is that the typhoons now hitting the country are increasing in number (more than 20-21 per year) and are becoming stronger and stronger. Almost half of the more than 20 typhoons hitting the country in recent years have center winds of 185 kilometers per hour or more.
While we are powerless to do anything about the weather, especially the typhoons, which are formed by intensified atmospheric pressure gradients, we can do something to mitigate the effects of the climatic changes occurring around us. The most important thing we can do, especially at this time, is to protect our environment. There is no other option left for us but to protect the environment. There is no such thing as a choice between development (including environmental destruction that goes with it) and protection of the environment, if we are to save humankind and all of creation from extinction. Those who advocate this choice are inconsistent because there is no development that does not involve the environment directly or indirectly. That is why the global millennium development goals include the environment.
It is common sense to realize that original or primary tropical rain forests that used to occupy a larger proportion of our land absorbed the large amounts of rainfall brought about by typhoons, thus minimizing floods. They also reduced the strength of typhoons on land. Now rainforests on our highlands and lowlands are practically gone. What we should have done was to reserve large areas of these forests as protection forests, but our policy in the past was to cut them down and convert them to money. We should not follow the example of our neighbors like Indonesia, which continues to allow logging of its tropical rain forests. Indonesia is not as vulnerable to cyclonic storms as the Philippines because it lies outside of the typhoon belt.
In the marine world, our research findings show that coral reefs inside marine reserves protected from human exploitation activities are more resistant to the effects of climate change such as diseases that develop as a result of increase of seawater temperatures. By not disturbing our fish populations inside marine reserves, the resiliency of coral reef ecosystem is maintained, preventing the collapse of this important ecosystem in the face of climate changes. Methods of fishing that destroy the fragile framework of corals make these animals more vulnerable to storm damage brought about by climate change. Similarly, disturbances of the natural environment, such as dredging, reclaiming, and mining of coastal areas, should be stopped as a matter of policy.
In brief, activities of people described above destroy the integrity of the environment and increase the vulnerability of our terrestrial and marine ecosystems to the extreme weather conditions. This is the reason why we have to create more protected areas in our terrestrial, coastal and marine areas as our response to climate change.