IT is the middle of the cold winter in the northern hemisphere and the middle of the hot summer in the southern hemisphere. This may explain the bushfires that have been raging for days in southeastern Australia, some 6,000 kilometers southeast of the Philippines.
At least 24 people have been reported dead in fires that have now destroyed over 5.9 million hectares and some 1,300 homes in six states, mostly in New South Wales, the country’s most populous state. In comparison, last year’s forest fires in California destroyed about 404,680 hectares.
While the traditional fireworks welcomed the New Year in Sydney Harbor, fires were destroying hundreds of thousands of homes to the south. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who had been seen on TV watching the fireworks, received an angry welcome when he visited the town of Cobargo in New South Wales the next day.
Between the Philippines and Australia, a disaster of another kind has hit Indonesia. The death toll in Jakarta and surrounding areas rose to 30 the day after New Year, while tens of thousands of people lost their homes in floods and landslides. The heavy rainfall is expected to last to mid-February. President Joko Widodo has already announced plans to move the capital of Indonesia from Jakarta, which he said is sinking, to East Kalimantan province on Borneo island.
We have fires in Australia because of the extreme heat, but floods in neighboring Indonesia because of heavy rains. We can only surmise that such disparate and extreme weather conditions must be related to the climte change which scientists have long been warning against.
The world’s temperature has been steadily rising for years, due to the rise of carbon dioxide and other factory emissions in the world’s industrial economies. The polar ice has been melting, ocean levels have been rising, and typhoons and hurricanes have become more powerful and destructive.
In 2015, 195 nations of the world adopted a global climate pact committing every nation to reduce its greenhouse emissions, to contribute to a goal of limiting the rise in world temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, the United States, the world’s biggest producer of carbon emissions, withdrew from the agreement as President Trump called climate change a “hoax.”
The other big sources of carbon emissions in the world today are China, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, India, France, Canada, and Poland. They all have national commitments to the agreement drawn up at the Paris conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The Philippines and most of the world’s nations are minor contributors to these carbon emissions, but we stand by our commitment as stated in a Philippine Statement submitted to the UN by then Secretary Ramon Paje of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources pledging to pursue government programs and strategies for greater renewable energy and green growth.
We must carry on with our commitments and hope that all the other nations of the world acknowledge their part in the effort to mitigate climate change which, we believe, is behind the increasing number of extreme weather changes such as the bushfires in Australia and the floods in Indonesia.
