(The month of July spotlights National Disaster Resilience Month, stress the need for Filipinos to be fully conversant about disaster risks, invest in disaster risk reduction, increase disaster awareness and enhance community preparedness for effective response. Today’s Daily Laborer issue dwells on fires and landslides in CAR.)
ATOK, Benguet – In June of 2023, classmates Amador Kabliyen and Ralf Kispay, both 22-year-old strapping lads from Camp 8, Baguio City and about to graduate from college, decided to work as farm hand on a homestead in Atok municipality and make their school vacation fruitful and worthwhile.
One hot day while hoeing the fields in a forested area with other farm hands, they smelled smoke as a fire broke out. The farm hands stared in horror as the blood red glow rose up behind them.
A rampaging wildfire was raging through the Atok forest, a wall of flames devouring anything in its path. The farm hands broke ranks and raced away for their lives.
“Ralf!” Kabliyen shouted, grabbing his hand. “Ditoy ti pagna-an ta!” (This way!)
They took off along the forest path and the hot wind gusted heavily. Suddenly, the air was filled with sparks. On the ground were glowing embers and chunks of flaming wood. The two gangling boys felt the heat against their skin, searing them, as tongues of flames reached towards them, like reddish teeth of a flesh-eating monster.
Whoosh! A leaping tongue of fire ignited the branches of a dead Benguet pine. Whoosh! The fire leaped on the pine’s treetop. Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
With every gust of wind, more embers swirled and flames shot higher than the burning grasses. A nightmare of sounds crashed against the boys’ ears, mingling with the fire’s roar, the moaning wind and the cracking and snapping of burnt Benguet pine branches.
It was as though the air was shrieking in agony.
The boys struggled to breath in the thickening smoke. Then suddenly a burning pine tree branch exploded and splintered wood sprayed out.
Ralf looked up and saw the flaming branch speeding through the air. It was headed straight for his skull.
Ralf dropped to his knees in shock as the burning branch sped by; it missed his head.
Rallying, the Atok farmers near where the wildfire started, fought back. The fire has not yet eaten a half hectare of the forest. But if left alone, it would devour part of the mountainside that could spill to other areas.
With spades, hoes, sickles and other agricultural tools, the created a firewall and hoped for the best that breastwork will stop the roaring flames. They used dirt to suffocate the fire.
The fire reached the firewall and with nothing to fuel its rage, the fire slowly died down. Like a serpent gutted, the remaining flames tried to reach out for dried materials already not there because it was cut down. With no food, the burning serpent slowly fizzled out.
With soot in their noses and eyes, the tired farmers, with blackened faces sat down and surveyed wearily the burned area – now almost half a hectare – and wondered how the wildfire started.
Amador and Ralf, having experienced for the first time fighting a wildfire with the Atok farmers, sat stunned and speechless.
During the first weeks of 2024, Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) had 200 hectares of its forests devastated by 33 forest wildfires, said the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP-CAR). Largest affected area was in Itogon, with 134 hectares reduced to ashes.
In 2023, a total of 199 incidents of non-structural fires occurred, compared to 102 incidents in the year 2022, punctuating an emergent environmental and safety impact requiring urgent action to prevent further damage.
Non-structural fire was best pointed out by BFP-CAR as including grass fires, forest fires, wildland fire, rubbish fire or fires that occur within vegetation such as trees, grasses and shrubs.
On the other side of the flip coin, CAR experienced 119 landslides and 33 flooding incidents that wreaked havoc on roads, shelter damage, livelihood damage and casualties.
A study, “Mapping Forest Vulnerability to Fire and Landslides in the Cordillera Region, Philippines,” dove deep into why forest fires and landslides pose critical threats to remaining forests in CAR.
The study was conducted by Bernard Peter O. Daipan, College of Forestry, Benguet State University (BSU) and Diomedes A. Racelis, College of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of the Philippines Los Banos, Laguna.
Regarding the study, the authors would like to extend heartfelt thanks to the Department of Science and Technology – Accelerated Science and Technology Human Resource Development Program (DOST – ASTHRDP) for the scholarship grant that made this study possible.
Special thanks are also due to Julius K. Cawilan, Gladies Sabo, Cirilo Gali, foresters of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources- Cordillera Administrative Region (DENR-CAR) who have been instrumental in bringing this work to realization and to Ms. Sarah Jane and Mr. Paul Isaac for their unwavering support throughout the completion of the study.
In tracking CAR’s Forest vulnerability to fire and landslide, the two savants discovered first, that CAR’S remaining forest cover “is already fragmented and rapidly depleting. And the more the CAR forests are fragmented, the more these are vulnerable to fires.”
An estimated 116 thousand hectares or 8.5 per cent of the forests in CAR are vulnerable to fire, Daipan and Racelis stressed.
“There has been an increasing trend of fire incidents and burned areas observed in both natural and plantation forests in the region,” the duo wrote in the study.
CAR’s forest cover was around 1.35 million hectares in 2021, representing 73 per cent of CAR’s total land area.
From 2013 to 2020, 8,000 hectares of natural forest and 11.5 thousand hectares of plantation forests were razed to the ground.
Benguet had the highest incidence of forest fire, with 11 thousand hectares burned from 2013 to 2020, or 54 per cent of the total burned forest area in CAR. Kalinga, Mountain province, Ifugao and Abra followed suit.
Apayao province recorded the lowest burned area in the same period, with only 43 hectares of forest razed.
One primary and plausible reason for high incidence of forest fire in Benguet is that its major vegetative cover is pine forest, which is more vulnerable to fire, the researchers interpolated.
And such a situation is aggravated by factors like fragmented forests, proximity to settlements, upland farming practices, topography and shortage of rainfall during the dry season.
Aside from kaingin, the expected increase in temperature and decrease in precipitation in CAR during the dry season were pointed by the researchers as responsible in CAR’s forest fires, more particularly in the pine forest ecosystems.
Benguet pine or pinus insularis and pinus kesiya possess numerous resin canals in their barks and this resin, a sticky liquid, can easily ignite. This resin is especially used in the manufacture of nail polish for women, paint, varnish and ink, among others.
Resin tapping is regulated in CAR.
More severe forest fires, larger burned areas and longer fire durations are in store in CAR as a result of the warming climate in the decades ahead, spelling negative outcomes for livelihood and the people, the researchers explained.
Delving on landslides, the forest scientists established that nearly 73 percent of CAR’s forested areas “are vulnerable to landslides at a high to extremely high level.”
Total area of CAR forests highly vulnerable to landslides, based on overlay analysis, is almost 250,000 hectares, or 18 percent of the region’s total forest area.
Benguet Province had the largest forest area highly vulnerable to landslides with 164,000 hectares. Almost 80 per cent of forests in Benguet are highly vulnerable to landslides.
Abra, Mountain province and Kalinga have forest areas with more than 10,000 hectares each that are very highly vulnerable to landslides.
Forests in the eastern portion of Abra are highly vulnerable. The red linear patterns observed in the provinces of Apayao, Kalinga, Mountain Province and Ifugao “could be forest areas with slope modifications such as road constructions, agriculture and/or settlement area expansion which are highly vulnerable to landslides,” the scientists observed.
These areas should be prioritized in terms of risk reduction planning and implementation not only to minimize loss of forests but, more importantly, to minimize or prevent their effect on humans, Daipan and Racelis warned.
Contributory to the vulnerability are, the region’s rough topography and exacerbating the topography problem are human-generated activities like local/ large-scale mining, slash and burn agriculture and premeditated pursuits that tend to harm forest cover.
Such problems can be gleaned from the fact that between 2007 and 2018, CAR suffered from 182 major landslides, aside from small landslides, the researchers noted.
Consequently, the researchers concluded that proactive measures must be taken to protect CAR’s vital ecosystem including its communities. While government authorities work to bolster fire prevention and landslide response mechanisms, it is imperative that cooperation of communities is harnessed, the researchers commented.
More strikingly, climate change has been affecting CAR forests at the local and regional levels. In particular, forest fire as wildfire, drought, invasive species, insect and pathogen infestation, typhoons, windstorms, ice storms in Benguet and other provinces and landslides all have detrimental impact on CAR’s remaining forest stands, the scientists concluded.
