Every summer, the same problem trickles—then gushes—into the headlines: Baguio’s water woes. Households with empty water tanks and pails. Tourists with long, indulgent showers. Water trucks clogging narrow barangay roads. It’s the same story; only the years have changed.
The city, long advertised as a cool summer escape, has always been strapped for water. Baguio was built for 25,000 people. Now it hosts nearly 400,000 residents and welcomes over a million tourists a year. It’s no surprise that our water supply is strained, but what’s disheartening is how the response still centers on patchwork fixes, rather than long-term vision.
The Baguio Water District (BWD) recently announced that the city won’t face a drought this year, unlike 2023. Their optimism stems from the continued drilling of deep wells, with 30 to be added until 2026. The mayor calls this “good news.” But is it?
Relying on deep wells, especially at this scale, raises serious red flags. Each well draws from our already stressed aquifers. Without enough natural recharge—water that seeps back into the ground through forests and green spaces—we’re siphoning from a limited reservoir that can and will run dry. And Baguio’s overbuilt slopes, thinning pine stands, and dwindling open spaces are contributing to its inability to replenish that underground storehouse.
We’re stuck in a dangerous cycle: We pave over watersheds to build hotels, then drill more wells to supply those hotels, which, in turn, invite more people and generate more waste and runoff. These things stress the environment. But we’re in denial, that’s all.
The real solutions have been hiding in plain sight. Reforestation is one. Forests, especially pine stands, are natural water banks. They absorb rain, reduce runoff, and allow water to filter slowly into underground aquifers. Yet green spaces in the city continue to lose out to concrete.
Another is managing tourism sustainably. Do we need to welcome every tourist who shows up at the gate? At what point do we start turning some away—or charging appropriately for the environmental cost of their visit? Baguio’s carrying capacity is not unlimited. But our local leaders seem more concerned with numbers than with sustainability. Yes, even as they’ve been using it as a buzzword to win awards.
We don’t lack water. We lack vision. We lack the political will to make unpopular but necessary choices: protecting forests, limiting (over)development, rethinking tourism, and not digging more holes.
If we continue this way, tapping out is only a matter of time. Digging deeper into the earth isn’t the answer. We need to go back to the surface and start taking care of what’s really keeping the water flowing: our forests, our soil, and our shared sense of responsibility.
Until we do, Baguio summers will always come with a shortage. Not just of water, but of foresight.
