We have had already several typhoons and yet the news for the past few days have been of water shortages and emergency situations. The water in Angat dam this week fell below the record low registered in September 1998, which was an El Niño year. The worry is due to the fact that Angat supplies more than 90 percent of the water supply of Metro Manila and is used by the two water concessionaires in the area, Manila Water in the East Zone and Maynilad in the West.

The week that was marked the return of the rainy season with afternoon downpours becoming more and more the norm. After a scorching summer, everybody welcomed the respite albeit with a prayer that the twin floods of last year brought about by Typhoon Ondoy and Pepeng don’t happen again.

As we celebrate Earth Day 2010, let us remember that the state of our environment is tied to the political and economic aspects of our society.

This link is crucial to understand why—in spite of our country’s rich natural resources—we have remained underdeveloped, our people deeper in poverty and has become more vulnerable to the backlash of a destroyed environment.

The state of calamity in Mindanao due to the El Nino that was drummed up and recently declared by Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is something the government and the President could have avoided in its nine years in Malacanang.

We are reissuing this statement for the 2010 elections. Bayan Muna is running under the Makabayan coalition who has Rep. Satur Ocampo and Lisa Maza running for Senate.

AGHAM: WE SUPPORT BAYAN MUNA

Scientists group say people has to be first in science and technology

Since AGHAM’s founding in 1999, we have upheld that science and technology development cannot be divorced from the overall people’s development. In our long involvement in political affairs in both the national and international arenas, the partylist group Bayan Muna has proven firm and consistent with their support for the Science and Technology Agenda formulated in 2004 along with the agenda of other sectors of Philippine society.

SINCE the run up to the end of last year, climate change has been blamed pretty much for everything. The great floods and the disasters that struck the country were attributed to climate change. This year, with climate change still a distant possibility, much of everything is now being blamed on a weather event that is right here right now—El Niño.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern persists until now over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This warming of sea surface temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean is expected to last into the mid-year. The impact of this phenomenon is not only limited to the Philippines but is worldwide.

Coming from cold and snowy Copenhagen and braving the snowstorm and delayed trains, we are sad to report that the so-called Copenhagen Accord leaves us with business as usual and no legally binding commitment to reduce emissions in the world. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez criticized the process of passing the accord as undemocratic. The Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America (ALBA) composed of nine Latin American countries sharply pointed out that the so-called Copenhagen Accord did not undergo the normal negotiating procedures.

The climate negotiation in the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP 15) in Copenhagen has come to a sour end. The world’s high expectation for a meaningful and binding agreement is doused with icy cold water by a nonbinding deal dubbed as “Copenhagen Accord” —a deal primarily brokered by the most powerful and leading polluter country in the world—the United States.