WE have a plan. It’s a 3 year plan. We will Address the El Niño. There Is A Plan in place now. It will do things and we will not dry out during the dry out time.
Well, supposedly. The details are scant so far. We just know that there is A Plan and that is a three-year plan. One of the few details we do know is that they want to bring back the use of household rainwater utilization – according to Louie Lardizabal as head of the CDRRMO, it is a return to the old ways that the veteran Baguio residents should be familiar with – quoth, “
I am from Baguio, I grew up drinking water from the spout and it was safe. We used rainwater for everything- washing, cleaning, doing the laundry and even taking a bath. We can revive that practice so that the water does not go to waste.”
Again, details are scant. There are Strategic Goals in place to help mitigate the impact of the uberdry season for the next three years, and among them are the introduction of more rainwater harvesting, water filtration, and solar-powered gadgets (not quite sure what gadgets these are, but ‘Solar More Better’ in an environment that can support it, definitely).
Clearly, a lot of thought has been put into this. I don’t want to riff off of and mock genuine moves for positive change – which this is being sold as. And I agree that we do need to have a plan for the El Niño. It is a regular occurrence, and with the inevitable extremization of weather and weather phenomena brought about by man-made climate change, it is bound to get more severe. Dry spells so dry we’ll ration water at first, and then descend into the ten year Busol watershed wars as roving tribes of gun-toting post-apocalypse survivors contest the last remaining shreds of the Baguio water table. (Hopefully that never comes to pass.)
So let me make it clear that my trademark sarcastic style in the earlier parts of this piece are not quite in derision. I agree with this need. I wish we knew more about the specifics, but this is good. This is a start.
I just have a few reservations.
The first is – why now? We are taking a “whole-of-society” approach for 2023 to 2026 to fight El Niño, rapscallion that it is, but why now? Lardizabal himself – and anyone familiar with the matter, for that matter – will be clear that this is a cyclical, regular phenomenon that just so happens to be changing in severity and timing. But this is a known quantity, and has been for decades now. So the cursory question is, why are we having a dedicated policy for it only now in the year of our Lord 2023?
Maybe it is my lack of due diligence. Perhaps we have had an older policy for it (let me know) that simply lapsed my perception and now we are only making one that is more updated with the tools that we now have. The plan is also supposedly one that can be reimplemented after the program ends in 2026, and updated as the city moves along. This is a good idea. Again, let us wait for the details.
The second question I have is – will this be enough? On its own, the obvious answer is no – El Niño is not so easy of a problem that a three-year plan will be enough to beat it. But the bigger spectre that looms is the fact that we have decades ago long exceeded the expected output and capability of the city to provide.
We can stretch and stretch and exploit as efficiently as humanly possible, but math does not lie – the numbers we need are greater than the numbers the city can produce. The disparity is still workable, but as the population grows, the math becomes more and more awkward. We are already having to face villages without constant water connections, and the fear is that eventually the shortages will grow and people will be dropped off the grid entirely as it buckles under the weight of a growing and growing demand.
Is this city doomed to descend into the 2050 localized wars over the shrinking watersheds as people shoot each other over water, more precious than oil? Probably not. But the future of fighting over water, exaggerated as it may sound, is not implausible. Improbable, but shortage is inevitable.
What we must contend with now is how we deal with this inevitability.
