It’s been almost a week since supertyphoon Haiyanravaged the Philippines, particularly the Visayas region, and reports of casualties are still turning up.  The initial estimate of number of deaths is 10,000—a figure that may look manageable on paper but is actually too grim to be believable.

Haiyan’s aftermath in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines (image from Manila Bulletin)

And yet this nightmarish reality—lost loved ones and destroyed homes and livelihood—is what the surviving Filipinos have to face now from here on.

The Philippines is no stranger to typhoons, and, for that matter, other calamities as well.  The island country lies in the Pacific Ring of Fire, which makes it vulnerable to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes—last month alone saw the province of Bohol levelled by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

This is a country that exhausts all 26 letters of the alphabet just to name the typhoons which visit it every year.  It just so happened that supertyphoon Haiyan—named Yolanda by the local weather bureau PAG-ASA—is the strongest ever to hit the country, and possibly the strongest ever recorded in the world.  Meteorologists say measuring the storm was futile as it was off the scale.  If from now on succeeding typhoons became as massive and catastrophic as Haiyan, we’d certainly need a new classification just to accommodate them in our charts.

Inarguably, behind this new breed of extreme weathers is climate change.  After all, it is from warming ocean waters that typhoons are formed and harness their energy.  Rises in sea temperature have a host of other effects on the ocean’s ecology—from fish kill to ocean acidification, but the most urgent of them all since they directly affects lives are stronger cyclones and typhoons.  If we didn’t pay attention to the other calamities that has befallen our planet in recent years, Haiyan here should now serve as a wake-up call.

Haiyan nearly smothers this part of the world as seen from space. (Image from AP)

The UN Climate Change Conference in Warsaw, Poland began talks last Monday, November 11.  Haiyan’s devastating presence in the Philippines just two days prior inevitably and dramatically highlighted the conference, especially as the Filipino delegate Naderev Sano broke down in tears while giving his speech.  As the Guardian reports,

“This was not just diplomatic theatricals or righteous grandstanding by a developing-country diplomat about the snail-like speed of the climate talks, which have dragged on for years and are not likely to conclude until 2015. What few people in Warsaw knew until Sano had nearly finished his speech was that even as he was addressing the UN, his brother was digging people out of the rubble of the ruined city of Tacloban and he and his family still did not know the fate of other relatives.”  

Clearly, the effects of climate change are real and urgent, personal even.  It’s not just some big word people burden themselves with as they try to appeal to others.  In fact, the most immediate victims of climate change such as coastal populations are the ones with the smallest contribution to the global warming.  That’s not to say that the Philippines and other developing nations are entirely faultless, but we have to admit, industrialized nations have been negligently pumping out carbon dioxide in tragically huge proportions for decades.

The Warsaw Conference was supposed to consolidate governments and businesses to take definite action.  On paper, that’s easy to say, but when the effects of climate change are too distant from their homeland, it’s far easier and more convenient for others to take the issue lightly.

We’re all in this together now, and there’s no point in blaming.  In a matter of time, Filipinos will bounce back and be all smiles once again, a virtue they’re known for considering the myriad disasters they face each year.

What matters is what the world does differently this time around once the rubble has cleared.