Manila faces worsening floods

By Agence France-Presse

BARAS, Rizal: From her house in a Manila suburb, Rowena Jimenez can't see the bare mountains around the built-up city. But she feels the impact of deforestation every time her living room floods.

Slash-and-burn farming, illegal logging, open-pit mining and development fueled by population growth have stripped the once-densely forested Philippines of much of its trees.

In Manila, where more than 13 million people live, low-lying areas are often inundated when storms lash the Sierra Madre mountain range, which lies east of the city and acts as a barrier to severe weather.

But without enough trees to help absorb the rain, huge volumes of water run off the slopes and into waterways that flow into the metropolis, turning neighborhoods into disease-infested swamps.

Jimenez, 49, has lost count of the number of times the Marikina River has broken its banks and flooded the ground floor of her family's two-bedroom concrete house, a few blocks from the water's edge.

"There is always fear that it will happen again," said Jimenez, who lives with her husband, youngest daughter, sister, nephew and mother.

"Your heart sinks because you realize the things you worked so hard to buy will be destroyed again."

Jimenez blames environmental "abuses" upstream in the nearby Upper Marikina River Basin — a catchment spanning roughly 26,000 hectares (64,500 acres) in the southern foothills of the Sierra Madre.

Only 2.1 percent of the watershed was covered by dense "closed forest" in 2015, according to a World Bank report.

Runoff from the mountains drains into the basin, which is critical for regulating water flow into Manila.

It was declared a "protected landscape" in 2011 by then-president Benigno Aquino, under a law aimed at ensuring "biological diversity and sustainable development."

That was two years after Typhoon "Ketsana," known in the Philippines as Tropical Storm "Ondoy," had submerged 80 percent of the city and killed hundreds of people.

But by then, many of the trees in the catchment had been cleared to make way for public roads, parking lots, private resorts and residential subdivisions.

Jimenez still shudders at the memory of the water reaching 23 feet (7 meters) high and forcing her family to huddle together on the roof of their house.

"We didn't salvage anything but ourselves," she said.