Losing a child is said to be the greatest tragedy of all. Many of us couldn’t stand to even think about it. It is just unnatural to outlive one’s offspring.
However, leaving our children in a world that has become more unpredictable and inhospitable than that which we grew in could be equally tragic, if not more so.
It speaks of our failure to prepare for them a better life…our failure to halt the continuing legacy of passing the bill for the next generations to foot.
The deluge that befell the Philippines in the past couple of weeks reminded us of what we have been conveniently ignoring. The signs were already recognizable for many decades and the truth already known to our generation. And yet climate change was a mere inconvenience, the existence and inevitability of which we deny or push aside to free us to continue the previous generations’ unbridled pursuit of economic prosperity above all else.
Everyone, including the government, was caught unprepared and still wonders how such a relatively weak storm as Ketsana (Philippine name is “Ondoy”) unloaded a month’s worth of rain in only six hours and how typhoon Parma (or “Pepeng” locally) strangely lingered in the northernmost part of the Philippines for about a week and making landfall thrice.
The untold suffering and damage caused by these unprecedented weather events have been reported and blogged about many times over. What needs emphasizing further is the peculiarity of these weather events, plus the human folly that exacerbated the problem (among others, deforestation, poor land use planning and implementation, mounting garbage and irresponsible disposal, not to mention poor disaster risk management that resulted to unnecessary loss of lives).
The unpredictability of recent weather events had been linked to changes in global temperature. In addition, weather extremes (heat waves, droughts, floods) had recently been experienced around the world more and more.
Worse, the brunt of climate change’s negative impact would fall on the poor people and poor nations. Their vulnerabilities would become more apparent once food production is adversely affected as productive land either become deserts or be engulfed by the rising sea levels. Food scarcity would result to food prices rising beyond the reach of many and food riots could ensue. In such a scenario, life would be risky and even the rich might not be spared from the turmoil.
We may differ in how we assign importance to climate change. But our role as parents should put us in a common ground. We do not want our children (and theirs) to face a harsher world, not if we can do something about it. And we can…yes, we can still leave the world better than how we found it.
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