S P E C I A L
R E P O R T
UK
United Nations Climate Change Conference Text by Aimee Alado-Blake
Is this how our story is going to end? CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO
40
T
his is one of the provocative questions Sir David Attenborough asked in his speech to the Conference at the opening of #COP26 World Leaders Summit in Glasgow on 01 Nov 2021. But before we talk about the Conference of the Parties (COP26) also referred to as the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2021 (UNCCC), currently underway and entering its 2nd and final week, allow me to start by sharing ‘my climate change’ experience in my global south country. My family is from the province of Capiz known as the “Seafood Capital” of the Philippines. Our main business is in aquaculture (fishponds) and agriculture (sugarcane/corn). As a kid, we always enjoyed the harvest season in the fishpond as we happily watched tons (5,000 to 10,000 kilos) of prawns and milkfish being harvested through the sluice gate and into the net. Sometimes, we would playfully wade into the mud of the drained pond to collect some ‘stranded’ fishes.
Special Report
These are some of the happy memories of my childhood with abundant harvest each time. But sometime around late 80’s, the tons of prawns and fishes started to decline. From what used to be thousands of kilos of seafood, it went down to tens of kilos only. The extremely low mortality rate of the prawns/fishes were early signs of climate change. It was the same with the sugarcane production from our farms. As I kid, I was already familiar with the global phenomena of El Niño and La Niña and I have seen the consequences of this not only in our business but most especially in the livelihood of small farmers and fishermen. The Philippines is an archipelagic country of 7,100+ islands (could be less now due to climate change) and because of its geographic location in the Pacific Ocean and the Ring of Fire, it is prone to tropical storms and earthquakes. Typhoons have always been a part of life in the Philippines. We name the typhoons alphabetically each year and so the very first typhoon of the year would always be from A, then B and so on until Z. Sometimes, there were so many in a year that we get to Z and then start again from A completing the whole cycle for the year. Because such is the frequency, I got used to watching the devastation on tv or reading it in the news.
