NOTWITHSTANDING the opposition, vehement from both
fisherfolk and climate change warriors, it’s all systems go for the business mogul
Ramon Ang’s international airport in Bulakan, Bulacan.
Notwithstanding the assurance of Bases Conversion
and Development Authority president-CEO Vince Dizon that the Bulacan airport
will be “no problem” to the Clark airport, it cannot be helped that fears over
the future “operability” of the latter not only persist but even gets more
frightening. Given that the two airports would virtually share the same
airspace.
Clark is it! So, we have been carping about even
while the Americans still lorded it over the then biggest military installation
outside continental USA.
Clark is it! So, we believed even at the height of
the Pinatubo devastations.
Clark is it! Not so much for some pride-of-place
sentiments, as for sound logical, even geophysical reasons.
Here is one argument for the cause of Clark written
here over five years ago, under the heading High ground.
And – topping them all – Angeles.
That is in the field of least
vulnerability to climate change effects, as determined in a study of the World
Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Bank of Philippines Islands Foundation
(BPIF).
"Climate exposure, socioeconomic
sensitivities, and adaptive capacities are melded to generate scores which show
each city's climate vulnerability. A chronic recommendation is to climate-proof
local infrastructure by moving coastal roads and communities to high ground,
improving community drainage systems and investing in natural solutions like
mangrove forests to parry inbound storms." So noted WWF-Philippines vice chair
and CEO Jose Ma. Lorenzo Tan during a presentation at the Widus Convention
Center in Clark only last Tuesday.
Ensconced inland and rising over a
hundred meters above sea level, Angeles City, by accident of geography, has
neither storm surges nor tsunamis to fear at the threat of every storm.
Plus factors there for Angeles City
to make any comparison with Metro Manila all the more odious – to the latter’s
utter disadvantage. Which Tan himself highlighted with his call on government
to decentralize the capital region to the point of transferring government
executive departments to the provinces, with, presumably, lesser vulnerability
to the impact of climate change than Metro Manila which already
"represents a concentrated risk."
It can only be Angeles City – megamized
with its immediate suburbia of Mabalacat City, Porac and Magalang – as
destination point of any hegira from Metro Manila. He did not say it, but Tan
did not have to.
Suffice was his call on the
government to decide to “finally fully develop” the Clark International Airport
as premier international gateway, in the wake of projections that the Ninoy
Aquino International Airport has already reached beyond its lifespan.
Sangley, Bulacan
"Why build a new airport when
there is an existing one?" Tan asked, in obvious reference to various
plans of government and business taipans preferring over Clark some large
reclamation projects in Sangley and in Bulacan to ground the Philippines new
premier international airport.
Sheer squandering of time and
resources, an exercise both futile and fatal, given the storm surges,
liquefaction and subsidence inherent in seaboard areas.
As one natural law holds:
Water reclaims its own.
In actuality, the findings in the
WWF-BPIF study are not newly revealed truths.
For so long, in its campaign for the
full development of the Clark airport, the Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement has
always harped on the high elevation of Clark – along with Angeles City,
naturally – its distance from bodies of water, its flat expanse and strategic location
– at the heart of Central Luzon, serving as gateway to the North; at the hub of
the Asia-Pacific region.
Metro Manila’s congestive
constriction, its below-sea-level elevation – the apt word maybe submersion –
show the starkest comparison for such an easy, sound decision. It’s actually a
no-brainer situation. Which, would have augured, if not agreed, well with the
state of mind obtaining in this government.
Alas, it did not. And from the way
the currents of events are, it is not so, it will not be so. At least until
2016. The actualization of the potentials of Clark International Airport, I
mean.
But we can salvage some consolation
here. Our faith in the supremacy of Clark over any other airport, extant and
planned, as premier international gateway; our vision of a future – so bright,
you have to wear sunglasses, to steal some wag’s blurb – for Angeles City and
its environs have been given their weight in gold with the stamp of the
WWF-BPIF.
So, we just have to keep up with our
Clark advocacy. Dare to struggle, dare to win. As the activism of our past
inflamed us.
Finally, as much a signal honor as a
daunting challenge to Angeles City – to its government as well as to its people
– is that ranking of least vulnerability to climate change effects.
With the increasing migration and its
equally increasing social cost to the city – from garbage to ghettoes, from the
exhaustion of natural resources – water, foremost – to environmental pollution,
not to mention unemployment, poverty and crime, Angeles can easily lose that
rating of least vulnerability.
In that sense, vigilant action is not
just the call of the hour, it has to be the way of life for the
city.
We cannot anymore afford to squander
through indifference, neglect or abuse, what nature has so generously bestowed
upon this city.
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