FOR eight days in the middle of this month, forest fires raged in the pine forests of Kabayan, Benguet.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) reported extensive damage to the natural pine forests as well as to forest plantations that had been established under the Expanded National Greening Program.
Destroyed in the natural forests were 452 hectares with nearly 5,000 young trees. In the plantations, over 160,000 trees in 191 hectares were destroyed. Total damage was estimated at P1.5 million. The Bureau of Fire Protection said the fires may have started at a site where cows are maintained, but there was no definite finding of what caused the fires.
The Benguet fires are small ones compared to the ones that have hit California in the United States and in the southeastern areas of Australia.
For several months in 2018 and 2019, 8,527 fires raged in 766,000 hectares in various parts of southern California, destroying forests along with 22,751 homes and other buildings, at a total cost of $35 billion. The fires in Australia also raged for months in 2019, one of them even threatening the national government center in Canberra after razing over 35,800 hectares of forests and farmlands.
Our Benguet fire was but a small one compared to these huge conflagrations in the US and Australia but they all had a common cause – dry weather related to climate change, plus some accidental spark from a careless camp fire.
We are now at the end of our seasonal “amihan weather” in the Philippines. The cool northeast breezes from the arctic regions in the northeast will soon give way to the warm winds from the Pacific in the east. These next three months make up our annual summer season.
Alerts have already been issued for possible power deficiencies as the heat of summer raises our power consumption. We may also suffer periods of water rationing, as the water level in Angat Dam, our principal source of water in Metro Manila, steadily goes down through many rainless weeks.
The Benguet forest fires are a third summer threat that we must now guard against. We have so few forests left and the ones in Benguet are of particular importance to the people of Luzon, for they make up a major part of the natural greenery that draws the people of the lowlands to Baguio and nearby highlands on weekends.
We thus call on the DENR and all the other agencies concerned with our forests to be on special alert to ensure that our forests are safe this summer. We should, as a matter of fact, be drawing up plans to develop more of these forests to make up for the decades of deforestation in our country.
