FEU Public Intellectual Lecture Series | Dr. Mahar Lagmay | Part 2

Summary

In this engaging lecture, Dr. Mahar Lagmay discusses the crucial role of technology and scientific planning in disaster risk management, especially in the Philippines. He emphasizes the importance of real-time data and probabilistic hazard maps for early warning systems to predict and respond to natural disasters effectively. Dr. Lagmay stresses the necessity for accurate, timely, and understandable warnings coupled with appropriate responses to prevent disasters. By integrating local knowledge with advanced technologies, it's possible to anticipate climate impacts and develop communities sustainably, ensuring progress while minimizing risks from natural hazards.

Highlights

• Real-time flood prediction using sensor data provides critical lead time for evacuation. 🚨
• Probabilistic maps can anticipate various disaster scenarios, aiding in better planning. 📊
• Planning must consider increasingly frequent climate change impacts. 🌦️
• Community development should integrate disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. 🏗️
• Local knowledge is important but requires enhancement with technological data. 📈
• Utilizing disaster management platforms can promote national development. 🌆

Key Takeaways

• Dr. Lagmay highlights the importance of early warning systems to predict floods and other hazards. 🌊
• Real-time data from sensors can provide a crucial lead time for evacuations. 🕰️
• Probabilistic hazard maps are essential for understanding potential disasters. 🗺️
• Local knowledge must be supplemented by scientific data for effective disaster planning. 🌍
• Climate change adaptation requires anticipatory planning across all community sectors. 🔄
• Harnessing technology in disaster management can drive national development. 🚀

Overview

In his insightful lecture, Dr. Mahar Lagmay elucidates the power of technology in forecasting and mitigating natural disasters in the Philippines. He underscores how early warning systems, drawing on real-time data, are vital in providing lead times for evacuating communities threatened by floods, landslides, and storm surges. According to Dr. Lagmay, the fusion of science and traditional knowledge can significantly enhance disaster preparedness.

Dr. Lagmay emphasizes the importance of probabilistic hazard maps, which depict multiple disaster scenarios, improving our ability to plan for extraordinary events. He argues that these tools are crucial for detailing the likely impacts of climate change, thereby informing actionable disaster risk reduction strategies. This kind of anticipation is key to minimizing the damage of events predicted by climate models.

By integrating climate change adaptation with disaster risk reduction efforts, Dr. Lagmay envisions a future where communities not only mitigate risks from natural hazards but also thrive economically and socially. His call to action involves using the foundation of disaster risk management to foster sustainable national development, underscoring the role of scientific knowledge in building resilient futures.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Disaster Risk Assessment The chapter provides an overview of disaster risk assessment with a focus on the Philippine context. It discusses the multi-agency coordination efforts undertaken whenever a typhoon enters the Philippine area of responsibility. This includes regular meetings among all concerned agencies to ensure preparedness and effective response strategies.
• 01:00 - 02:30: Importance of Early Warning Systems In this chapter, the importance of early warning systems for disasters is highlighted. It emphasizes the need for hazard-specific, area-focused, and timely warnings. The chapter discusses the approach to monitoring environmental changes, such as increased rainfall and rising water levels, as indicators for triggering warnings to prepare for incoming hazards.
• 02:30 - 05:00: Effectiveness of Warning and Response The chapter discusses the concept of monitoring water levels to prevent disasters. Normally, water levels remain stable without any rain, but they rise significantly during severe weather disturbances. The key to averting disasters lies in detecting rising water levels early enough to take preventive action.
• 05:00 - 09:00: Probabilistic Hazard Maps vs. Interview-Based Maps The chapter discusses the comparison between probabilistic hazard maps and maps based on interviews. It highlights the advantage of using sensors to predict hazards by providing lead times of up to 12 hours for evacuation. The use of such technology in Pedra is mentioned, which allowed for hazard-specific, area-focused, and time-bound warnings.
• 09:00 - 16:00: Role of Technology and Science in Planning The chapter discusses the importance of technology and science in planning, particularly in disaster risk management (DRM). It highlights an incident where the DRM officer was notified of impending big floods at noon, while the floods were predicted to peak at 6:10 PM. The early warning allowed the DRM officer from the local government to evacuate people from hazardous areas in time. The chapter explains the process of issuing such warnings, which involves using sensors to record rainfall data and employing techniques like contouring to analyze the information.
• 16:00 - 21:00: Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction The chapter discusses the severe impacts of rain on different regions, highlighting the difference in rainfall levels and their potential to cause flooding. In the UK, 100 millimeters of rain is enough to flood a village, while in Metro Manila during 2012 and 2013, rainfall reached as high as 1063 millimeters, showcasing the extreme conditions faced in different parts of the world.
• 21:00 - 26:00: Conclusion: Using Disasters to Propel Development In this concluding chapter, the focus is on utilizing natural disasters as a catalyst for development. The discussion includes comparative mentions of different countries, particularly highlighting how certain regions, like Brazil, have adapted to and managed significant amounts of rainfall. The narrative suggests that instead of being deterred by the fear of natural hazards, these challenges can be strategically leveraged for progress and sustainable development. Emphasis is placed on understanding the science of rainwater runoff and its broader impact on the environment and infrastructure, underscoring a proactive approach to disaster management and incorporating innovative solutions into development planning.

FEU Public Intellectual Lecture Series | Dr. Mahar Lagmay | Part 2 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] we disaster risk assessment wherein every time there is a typhoon that enters the philippine area of responsibility everybody meets up all agencies concerned with
• 00:30 - 01:00 disasters meet up and they discuss and the reason why they discuss is because they want to prepare for the incoming hazards and they know that the warnings that should be given are the wirings that are hazard specific area focus and time bound so the way they uh used it was okay for example when they see that it's raining in a certain place and the water level increases
• 01:00 - 01:30 you can alarm the people so water level that that is recorded without any rain is actually more or less at a certain height but when there's a severe weather disturbance it goes up and then when it suddenly goes up that's when the disaster strikes the trick to avoid the disaster is to catch the water level while it's on the
• 01:30 - 02:00 rise so if you have sensors that give you an idea of where it's raining and then you look at the water level sensor from upstream you know that you have at least about three to six hours sometimes 12 hours lead time to evacuate and that was used in the past in pedra to provide hazard specific area focused and time-bound warnings and when
• 02:00 - 02:30 the drm officer was called at around 12 o'clock big floods happened at 6 10 so there was a lead time and before the peak floods happened the drm officer in the local government unit was already able to take them away from from the hazards so just to explain further how to do that warning so for example from the sensors there's a record of rainfall now it's color the term is contouring now from the the sensor record you
• 02:30 - 03:00 contour it's yellow there it's blue yellow means 300 to 400 millimeters of rain in the uk when they talk about 100 millimeters of rain that's the type of rain that will cause a flood and will devastate an entire village that's in the uk but during habaga in 2012 in 2013 we had rainfall in metro manila that reached about 1063 millimeters
• 03:00 - 03:30 ten times more than what the british people fear so we are actually in some some way brazilian this one is 300 so as shown in that color the scale says says 300 to 400 so if it rains in the mountains the water will not all sit through the ground some will run off on the surface and when they run
• 03:30 - 04:00 off they enter into streams enter into rivers okay and eventually end up into the sea okay so if the community is here vegan is there if the community is here and you record rainfall at a certain instance to be more than 100 millimeters in this case 300 to 400 millimeters you have enough time to avoid the flood which will come 46 hours later okay and that is the use
• 04:00 - 04:30 of technology you know it's called as an early warning system and we need to put that in place because if you don't put that in place then there's no wiring system if there's no warning system we are caught unaware another case happened in cagayan the oro this was on december 4 2012 so this sensor recorded rainfall that that caused the river to to go up from this level from
• 04:30 - 05:00 one meter to eight meters in the span of one hour one hour to mass 18 you know how high eight meters is that's two floors where else will that water go but to the sea and before it reaches the sea it will have to pass through again the oro which was devastated a year earlier in 2011 but despite the high water levels
• 05:00 - 05:30 and the floods rushing in very quickly it's called as a flash flood by the time it came rushing towards sagayan they were already wide because of technology there was an early warning system and when the floods came rushing in all of the people were just in the hills trying to view that hazard again so these are the last nights the female disasters that happen
• 05:30 - 06:00 ever since meccano project noah these are disasters that happen disasters that were averted but up to vinta no but there were also some that happened after 20 2012 like the pablo landslide like the storm surge of cayenne tropical storms that devastated many towns in biliran
• 06:00 - 06:30 as well as mindanao respectively in avoiding disasters there are two types there are two key elements warning and response warning is the responsibility of government it must be accurate reliable timely and understandable okay but no amount of good warning or accurate warning will work if you don't take action
• 06:30 - 07:00 goodbye am i correct did you hear that alive
• 07:00 - 07:30 no you don't have a cell phone nokia so you didn't even bother so what about the others so with a warning this is the responsibility of government there must be a corresponding appropriate response which is you your response and your response must be
• 07:30 - 08:00 appropriate not responding sleeping and being warned not even bothering to look outside that's not appropriate but sometimes if you do that sometimes people evacuate but you need maps to tell you where to evacuate yeah and sometimes people go to evacuation centers that are the places where they die right so maps are very important like for example in tacloba
• 08:00 - 08:30 there was a storm search warning two days in advance two days in advance but the maps that were provided to them two years before which was used by the lgu showed the storm surge inundation of the postal area here here here here voila
• 08:30 - 09:00 and it's based on interviews so interviewing
• 09:00 - 09:30 so it's based on the experience of the community not that i'm saying that it's not it's not good data but it's probably not sufficient it's necessary to collect the data from the people but it's not sufficient because what happened during yolanda was in an event that was bigger than what they remember correct because this was a bigger event
• 09:30 - 10:00 than what they knew and therefore they were caught off guard they were surprised but i'm in a surprise what we needed before you land the strap was a kind of map called as a probabilistic hazard map it's multi multi-scenario it depicts the small storm surge the big storm surges the bigger ones and the yolanda type storm surge and how do we have this kind of map a probabilistic hazard
• 10:00 - 10:30 before yolanda came we could have advised all of those people who went to evacuation centers where we could have advised people to move away two to three kilometers away from the coastline but we did not have those so the warning gave an absolute value of the height but did not give the inundation extent the inland inundation it was a
• 10:30 - 11:00 warning of an absolute height in a relative landscape okay so we need these kinds of maps we didn't have it let's say uh volatile technology at that time but now we do have it yeah we invested billions of pesos to help to get the technology lidar and to train young scientists to do the manual work
• 11:00 - 11:30 to run these simulations to create this kind of maps that would tell us that could have told us that these places are dangerous and 80 70 to 80 of the evacuation centers got inundated by storm surges hundreds of people died in those evacuation centers i'll give you another example this is a deterministic map single
• 11:30 - 12:00 scenario based on interviews yellow refers to low susceptibility to that this is an official map by the way so let's put the evacuation center here because amongst all the all of the places that's the lowest hazardous area the lowest susceptibility to hazards let's put the evacuation center there but of course after the disaster after it happened
• 12:00 - 12:30 many people died in that that place barangay and that all the map was changed because it's it already happened it's not it's part of the historical record already so it got transformed into a high susceptible flooding okay this is barangay and that one you can see that the river flows here it's a small river relatively small river so when the people were transferred to that place as an evacuation site something ah that river does not really become big
• 12:30 - 13:00 i don't know it's just like that we can stay here this is a safe place lacked science because the science and the technology would have shown that that place was dangerous but science was not used the technology was that what happened was when tithing boffa came in it rained and then it generated this big
• 13:00 - 13:30 debris flow a flood it's like a flood but instead of water it was eighty percent boulders twenty percent rocks so it overwhelmed barangay and duck each of these dots here uh green white dots these are rocks but yeah sometimes as big as that three meters below that man is the evacuation center where 566 people died they went to the evacuation center
• 13:30 - 14:00 they were one that's why they went to the evacuation center but what happened the response was not appropriate they went to the wrong place because the hazard map that was used did not reflect the bigger event than what they knew or than what they remembered so the lesson there is that when we make maps we make maps that
• 14:00 - 14:30 are supplemented by science and technology local knowledge is good it's necessary but not sufficient we must supplement it with science and technology to depict hazards of the future to depict climate change impacts when we talk about probabilistic maps it's multi-scenario as opposed to single scenario and in the philippine practice in single scenario nathan is the scenario that is what is the worst that is remembered by the community
• 14:30 - 15:00 but what if it is bigger than what the community remembers so we need multi-hazard multi-scenario maps these are called probabilistic maps so we have a storm surge that is small a storm surge that is bigger storm surge that is much bigger landslide storm surge vallulanda that was landslides then floods that are small bigger bigger and then we put them together because you have a multi scenario with the hazard probabilistic hazard
• 15:00 - 15:30 and despite that areas that are safe those in grey okay that's where you site the evacuation center not in the red place but you will not see that safe or dangerous areas if you don't use the technology and if you don't use the science and because of our investment we are now able to do that so this is interview based no
• 15:30 - 16:00 this is no landslide this is high landslide a low flash that's the deterministic fan card commandment gain on probabilistic you make a good depiction of the landscape at high resolution you are able to know the elevation you can plot all of the elements in that area even the land use map and you can show a small flat a bigger flag a much bigger plan so multi-scenario pakistan having probabilistic
• 16:00 - 16:30 bigger scenarios as well than what the community knows okay so for development planning that's very important let's say the interview based one will tell that community or the planner or let's put the evacuation center here or the school there see that's the people in the community remember that it does not flood in that area a bigger again than what has happened in the past
• 16:30 - 17:00 we are going to kill and that can only be shown using advanced technologies that can only be depicted if you use advanced technologies okay which makes use of science our understanding on the physics of flow of water and stability of rocks in the case of landslides we have been doing local climate change action plants for all communities and then diving communities this is
• 17:00 - 17:30 their land use plant you can put the flood the storms the storm surge the landslide hazards and their land use their planning put them all together and you can see the plants in relation to hazards so you don't need to imagine you can
• 17:30 - 18:00 already visualize and see where the dangerous and where the safe places are correct okay so in planning for settlement in a particular community ah that's what we choose and we chose that because the information was made available and it's very clear for agriculture uh okay nato in some parts but not all parties then let's plant in the non-flat road areas but for flood-flowing areas
• 18:00 - 18:30 for climate change we plant crops that are resilient to floods and for tourism carlow viewing center this is an actual example that's a municipality it's a world viewing center it's dangerous it's very dangerous landslides due to heavy rainfall may happen there any time but we know that the storms don't come in every day nevada don't pass through
• 18:30 - 19:00 every day there's about two to three times in a year from times five so what you do is you plan for uh a evacuation center then backup center so pack up and there's a storm and when it's in the south china sea people might exit that go back business as useful at the shortest possible time that's how you plan communities and when you plan it you don't just plan it for settlement in agriculture and for tourism you plan it for agriculture coastal
• 19:00 - 19:30 water health forestry biodiversity the environment energy education tourism infrastructure settlement and mining sectors imagine if you can plan a community and all communities of the country and plan it across all sectors doing anticipatory planning there will be true and real development of each and every municipality of our
• 19:30 - 20:00 country they will progress unhampered by the impacts of hazards don't be intimidated by this graph no this is just accumulated rainfall per day this is uh the frequency so once every 100 you know for example 280 millimeters of rain as recorded by pagasa this is the historical record of pagasa the black line but we've heard about climate change and
• 20:00 - 20:30 tsunami is a climate change if there's uh going to be impacts of global warming one of those impacts would be more intense and close bringing more rain so there are projections and this can be modeled so in that in 280 millimeters of rain when you project it to a climate exchange scenario in 2049
• 20:30 - 21:00 or at climate change scenario by 2079 you're nothing 280 millimeters that happens once every 100 years becomes more frequent it's going to be once every 12.5 days so with climate change not only in scale but in frequency as
• 21:00 - 21:30 well so we have to handle it more frequently we have to deal with it more frequently substance of climate change inducting once every 100 years once every 100 years in vista 280 i'm giving 400 millimeters the david but how do you translate that into planning so i give that knowledge of 280 now once every one hundred making 400
• 21:30 - 22:00 you're the municipal planner you're the architect you're the urban planner you know 280 million four hundred oh thank you okay but what will you do with that information how can you plan against the hazards the rain is not the hazard time
• 22:00 - 22:30 we must plan against the hazard so somebody must translate that increasing rainfall into a map like this that when translated new lane into a flood you can see the river and the flood plains inundated and what height of blood will happen and you can see
• 22:30 - 23:00 that this subdivision is okay but this application is not when that climate change event happens now extremely important this place is dangerous but these places are good even with increased rainfall due to climate change so we may want to think that preparing
• 23:00 - 23:30 for hazards the historical rainfall you know you're not recording preparing for the impacts of rainfall that will transform into floods as disaster risk reduction correct you you prepare for this historical record it's the rr disaster is reduction
• 23:30 - 24:00 but if you prepare for rains that are projected into the future bigger events of the future due to climate change you are doing preparation for future disasters but with climate change impacts and to address those future disasters you need to plan well you need to adapt to the climate change impacts and it's called climate change adaptation
• 24:00 - 24:30 but since you're dealing with disasters as well natural hazards we call it climate change adaptation disaster risk reduction we plan each and every community against the hazards against climate change impacts across all sectors we do anticipatory planning we are developing that community away from hazards away from disasters unhampered by natural natural disasters or natural hazards
• 24:30 - 25:00 if we do that for all 1634 municipalities of the philippines we not only develop each and every community we get them free from disasters and they develop their progress and if all of these municipalities progress our country develops our country progresses don't you like that don't you like that without being the president you can get the country to develop would you like to be part of that effort
• 25:00 - 25:30 wouldn't you like the philippines to be great and develop we use the disaster platform we use that bill to develop our country using probabilistic hazard maps and probabilistic risk assessment and local climate change action plans we make use of this concept reverse it make that disaster platform work for our country and make our country develop uc science
• 25:30 - 26:00 thank you [Music]
• 26:00 - 26:30 you