Haze and worry now challenge nearly 350,000 residents of Tuba town and Baguio City in Benguet following forest fires there raging since early this month, not helped any by winds and the ferocious El Niño phenomenon.
The residents – men, women and children – have been suffering from the smoke and smell of burning grasses and trees in areas within the reservation site of the Philippine Military Academy in Baguio as well as in Barangay Tabaan and Mt. Sto. Tomas in Tuba, all up at 1,500 meters above sea level.
People living near camps 4 and 6 in Tuba are worried about their safety as the fires are drawing closer to their property.
We are glad firefighters, volunteers and community groups have joined hands to control the blaze, fanned by winds blowing from the eastern portion of Baguio and Benguet – the fires threatening residential areas and have since destroyed an initial 20 hectares of trees and vegetation.
And the winds have kept fanning and rekindling the flames while investigation is going on to determine the cause of the fire.
And deforestation, unchecked, rears its ugly head.
Weather events like high atmospheric temperatures and dryness, or low humidity, offer favorable circumstances for a forest fire to start.
With El Niño exhaling its wrath across the archipelago, and likely to be as harsh through the edge of summer, we can see how easily a wildfire can grow.
Wind, high temperatures, and little rainfall can leave trees, shrubs, fallen leaves, and limbs dried out and primed to fuel a fire.
Where wildfires scorch the earth, deforestation becomes a serious problem for countries, the Philippines not exempted.
The country is home to a vast array of unique flora and fauna, but deforestation has put many of these species at risk of extinction.
Over the years, the Philippines government has implemented various programs and initiatives to combat deforestation and promote reforestation. The battle is ongoing.
We see the Philippines has made significant progress in recent years in its efforts to combat deforestation, when it implemented programs and policies to promote reforestation, sustainable forest management, and biodiversity conservation.
One such is the National Greening Program, which aims to plant 1.5 billion trees across 1.5 million hectares of land by 2028, the program touching success in planting millions of trees, and it has created thousands of jobs in the forestry sector.
Aside from the National Greening Program, the Philippines also enacted laws and policies to protect its forests, which include the Forest Management Bureau’s Community-Based Forest Management Program, aimed at involving local communities in forest management and conservation efforts.
But the smoke, nay the haze, in Benguet should wake up the authorities – given that reports on the forest fires suggest they are not just partly true. They are.
