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.
This photo taken on December 1, 2022 shows workers building a trail in the Masungi Georeserve in Baras. – 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 natural barrier to severe weather.
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. “There is always fear that it will happen again,” said Jimenez, who lives with her husband, youngest daughter, sister, nephew and mother.Jimenez blames environmental “abuses” upstream in the nearby Upper Marikina River Basin — a catchment spanning roughly 26,000 hectares in the southern foothills of the Sierra Madre.
It was declared a “protected landscape” in 2011 by then-president Benigno Aquino, under a law aimed at ensuring “biological diversity and sustainable development”. Jimenez still shudders at the memory of the water reaching 23 feet high and forcing her family to huddle together on the roof of their house.The combination of development in the catchment and wetter storms caused by climate change have exacerbated flooding in Manila, said Rex Cruz, a watershed management expert at the University of the Philippines.
Official data show “closed forest” cover in the archipelago — which has a total land area of 30 million hectares — declined from 2.56 million hectares in 2003 to 1.93 million in 2010. Protecting existing forests and replanting others are made difficult by corruption and sometimes violent conflict over land ownership and usage.
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