With hundreds dead or missing in floods and landslides in Quezon, Nueva Ecija and Aurora provinces, blame has fallen on illegal loggers who have stripped hillsides bare and turned lush green forests into death traps.
Geography has played its part too. The Philippine archipelago of some 7,000 islands sits astride Southeast Asia's typhoon belt and is usually the first country to be hit by typhoons from the Pacific Ocean.
Infanta, one of the hardest-hit areas, is usually the first port of call for an average of 19 typhoons and tropical storms that hit the Philippines every year, said chief government weather forecaster Prisco Nilo.
He said the latest storm was the 25th to veer into the Philippines this year, making it an exceptional year.
Government hydrologist Richard Orendain said although the residents of Infanta and nearby Real and General Nakar are used to typhoons, what they probably failed to anticipate was the consequences of the amount of rainfall that fell on the region over the past week.
Orendain told AFP that in one 24-hour period on Sunday some 144 millimeters (4.3 fluid ounces) of rain fell over the region. The monthly average for November is 611 millimeters.
"Even though it was not a strong typhoon, the destructive impact was magnified by the amount of rain that fell over the area," he said.
"We can't really say whether illegal logging was the main cause, though it may have contributed to it."
Orendain said the ground water table had "probably reached saturation point" noting that the area was hard hit by another storm just a week earlier.
"So the water had no where to go," he said.
With many in the government blaming illegal logging for the current disaster, President Gloria Arroyo ordered a nationwide crackdown.
"Illegal logging must now be placed in the order of most serious crimes against our people," Arroyo said in a statement Wednesday.
"The series of landslides and flashfloods that hit several parts of the country should serve as a wake up call for us to join hands in preserving our environment and stepping up reforestation."
Senator Richard Gordon has called for an investigation into the disaster.
"For years the the department of environment and natural resources has failed to go after the illegal loggers operating in many parts of the country," he told reporters Tuesday.
Vice President Noli de Castro said the country had still not learned the lessons from landslides and flooding in 1991 on the island of Leyte which left thousands dead.
"Illegal logging was found to be the main contributor to that disaster," de Castro said.
Forest economist Lourdes Catindig, of the government's natural resources and environment department, told AFP the southern Sierra Madre, which runs through the eastern section of the main island of Luzon, still has some forest cover left.
"We issued a logging moratorium in the area in the 1970s," she said.
In the last decade, the Philippines has suffered severely from natural disasters.
In 1990, central Luzon was hit by both a drought and a typhoon that flooded practically all of Manila.
Still more damaging was an earthquake in 1990 that devastated a wide area in Luzon, including Baguio and other northern areas.
The archipelago also straddles the so-called Pacific rim of fire and is home to some 200 volcanoes of which 17 are still active.
In June 1991, the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century took place at Mount Pinatubo, just 90 kilometers (55 miles) northwest of Manila. Up to 800 people were killed and 100,000 made homeless following the eruptions.
Photograph by Tomas Munita/AP Photos
Modern-Day Plague
Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every year.
The world’s rain forests could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.
Forests are cut down for many reasons, but most of them are related to money or to people’s need to provide for their families.The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers cut forests to provide more room for planting crops or grazing livestock. Often many small farmers will each clear a few acres to feed their families by cutting down trees and burning them in a process known as “slash and burn” agriculture.
Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also cut countless trees each year. Loggers, some of them acting illegally, also build roads to access more and more remote forests—which leads to further deforestation. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl.
Not all deforestation is intentional. Some is caused by a combination of human and natural factors like wildfires and subsequent overgrazing, which may prevent the growth of young trees.
Deforestation has many negative effects on the environment. The most dramatic impact is a loss of habitat for millions of species. Seventy percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the deforestation that destroys their homes.
Deforestation also drives climate change. Forest soils are moist, but without protection from sun-blocking tree cover they quickly dry out. Trees also help perpetuate the water cycle by returning water vapor back into the atmosphere. Without trees to fill these roles, many former forest lands can quickly become barren deserts.
Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day and holds in heat at night. This disruption leads to more extreme temperatures swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.
Trees also play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. Fewer forests means larger amounts of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere—and increased speed and severity of global warming.
The quickest solution to deforestation would be to simply stop cutting down trees. Though deforestation rates have slowed a bit in recent years, financial realities make this unlikely to occur.
A more workable solution is to carefully manage forest resources by eliminating clear-cutting to make sure that forest environments remain intact. The cutting that does occur should be balanced by the planting of enough young trees to replace the older ones felled in any given forest. The number of new tree plantations is growing each year, but their total still equals a tiny fraction of the Earth’s forested land.
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