QUEZON City, Philippines (March 15) – Our generation is the first to experience climate change, and the least we can do is to take a step in preventing the worse.
Earth Hour is a campaign that started in Sydney, Australia in 2007. It was participated in by 2.2 million homes and businesses. For a specific day and time, people will simultaneously shut their lights off to save energy and raise environmental awareness. Is an hour of darkness enough? It is obviously not. Aside from Earth Hour, Earth Day is also celebrated during March or April. It was founded by Senator Gaylord Nelson and organized in 1970 to promote environmental respect and awareness. Is a day enough? Maybe. Maybe not.
An hour, a day, a month or even a year for the Earth is not enough with just awareness. What it needs is not attention but rather actions. Why should we take action?
The Philippines experiences eight to nine tropical storms every year that reaches death toll numbering more than a thousand. Stronger typhoons are due to climate change. The Filipinos will not forget the strongest typhoon that hit the Philippines, the typhoon “Yolanda” or “Haiyan”.
“As the Earth warms up, that would include the oceans. The energy that is stored in the waters off the Philippines will increase the intensity of typhoons and the trend we now see is that more destructive storms will be the new norm.”, says Naderev “Yeb” Sano, Philippines’ representative at the UN Climate Change who happened to live in Tacloban, where typhoonmade one of its landfall. It caused too much destruction, not only in the physical aspect, but morally as well when people looted business establishments due to desperation.
As an archipelago, surrounded by waters, one of the major livelihoods is from marine and coastal resources. Over one million Filipinos were engaged in this livelihood, and it was estimated that 800,000 of these Filipinos are small-scale fishermen. The climate change affects the livelihood of these Filipinos because of factors such as coral bleaching, fish migration, and ocean acidification.
Coral bleaching was observed in 1980 and it was concluded that the warm temperature is the reason for it. Mass coral bleaching can cause starvation, shrinkage and death of coral reefs that support the species under the sea. The fish migration due to climate change sabotages the livelihood of fisherman. Lastly, ocean acidification happens because of the ocean absorbs the 30% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s around 150 billion tons since the Industrial Revolution.
In agriculture, it was recorded that there is a 2.69% decline in crop output from 2014 to 2015. This sector contributes 51.83 in the agriculture production. The decline was caused by the drought and Typhoon “Lando”, especially palay and corn farms.
Our home is where we depend. Is participating Earth Hour the least we can do? The Earth hour is one of the many more steps we have to take. Do not just go with the flow. Take a stand and declare it on Earth Hour.
REFERENCES:
http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/world/earth-day
http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/world/earth-hour
http://world.time.com/2013/11/11/the-philippines-is-the-most-storm-exposed-country-on-earth/
http://agstat.psa.gov.ph/?ids=agriperformance
https://www.edf.org/blog/2013/11/14/five-ways-climate-change-affecting-our-oceans
(written by Karen Llacuna, edited by Jay Paul Carlos, additional research by Lovely Ann Cruz)
