August 24, 2025 | 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — The current spate of flooding has compelled the Philippines to confront ineffective flood management tasks and handle the elements that made these offers problematic.
Drowned out within the political noise and the seek for accountability are voices from an often-overlooked subject essential in tackling this decades-old concern: science.
Mahar Lagmay, govt director of the College of the Philippines Analysis Institute (UPRI), lamented the repeated errors made over time by authorities officers.
“We’ve been doing flood management infrastructure for thus lengthy, and it’s all the time been targeted on cement. It shouldn’t be that manner,” he mentioned throughout the Panatag occasion on flood resilience initiatives in Valenzuela yesterday.
Lagmay – who in 2012 launched Undertaking NOAH (Nationwide Operational Evaluation of Hazards), which supplies hazard-specific, area-focused and time-bound warnings to native authorities items (LGUs) throughout disasters – confused the necessity to rethink flood administration methods.
“A complete-of-society and science-based strategy is vital, the place mayors and governors seek the advice of scientists to keep away from implementing ineffective flood management measures,” the federal government scientist mentioned.
A lot of the present dikes and comparable constructions within the nation are solely designed for floods with a 50-year return interval. Nevertheless, flooding these days has a return interval of 100 years, like what the metropolis endured throughout Hurricane Carina in 2024 and Hurricane Ulysses 4 years earlier than that, they usually’re turning into extra frequent.
“What was once a once-in-a-lifetime type of flooding is now being skilled 5 to 10 instances already,” Lagmay mentioned.
On Friday, the UPRI signed a memorandum of settlement with Valenzuela to develop a brand new city drainage grasp plan within the metropolis, changing its present two-decade-old plan. This complete blueprint goals to information future administrations in managing floods extra successfully.
“This ensures we aren’t going across the metropolis blindly. We now have a information on the place to construct infrastructure and the place to not,” Valenzuela Mayor Wes Gatchalian mentioned.
Laborious to succeed in
For a member of the federal government’s high advisory physique on science and know-how, it’s troublesome to penetrate LGU officers tasked to handle this longstanding concern.
Rex Victor Cruz, a part of the agricultural providers division of the Nationwide Academy of Science and Expertise (NAST), mentioned native governments can faucet the company’s experience in formulating their complete land use plans.
“However for some purpose, it’s troublesome to truly attain out to them and persuade them, ‘Can we do one thing collectively right here?’” Cruz mentioned in a current interview with “The Massive Story” on One Information.
NAST, he defined, has been consulted by policymakers and authorities businesses on issues like agriculture, however “it’s not equal throughout sectoral issues.”
Cruz, an professional in watershed administration and local weather change adaptation, mentioned a deal with infrastructure issues has overshadowed the necessity to restore broken ecosystems.
He highlighted his mannequin displaying the interconnectedness of ecosystems inside a watershed airplane. Known as the ridge to reef/watershed ecosystem administration (R2R/WEM) framework, it mainly illustrates how hurt to 1 pure system can exacerbate flooding.
“For example, if the forest atop the watershed is degraded, when rain comes down, most will simply move over land as a result of the soil is just not in a situation the place it may take in water,” Cruz defined.
“You go downstream, and in case you have grasslands that aren’t protected and yearly burnt, that makes the soil so laborious and so compacted. Once more, rain is not going to undergo it and can simply move over land,” he added.
And with inefficient flood management tasks – President Marcos has mentioned they’re sources of corruption and infrequently substandard or imaginary – flooding turns into huge and pervasive.
Cruz launched the R2R/WEM framework in 2023 to unify the fragmented local weather motion plans between native and nationwide governments.
In his 2023 paper, printed by the Asia-Pacific Community for World Change Analysis, Cruz and different scientists and environmentalists from the College of the Philippines-Los Baños confused the necessity to capacitate LGUs on implement the framework in land use and improvement planning.
Science Secretary Renato Solidum Jr. has beforehand emphasised the significance of adopting an built-in flood administration strategy involving a number of disciplines.
Throughout the celebration of the Regional Science, Expertise and Innovation Week in Calabarzon, Solidum mentioned flood management tasks needs to be mapped utilizing geographic data programs.
“All drainage river programs needs to be mapped out in order that we are able to see if these are interconnected or if the capability of rivers and present canals will nonetheless be sufficient to accommodate future rainfall,” he mentioned.
The Division of Science and Expertise is offering LGUs with applied sciences for planning beneath the good and sustainable communities program.