The sites are tracts of land in far-flung locations with thousands of houses in rows. Going to the sites, it is noticeable how far they are from the commercial centre and with poor accessibility to the road network. Therefore the Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor through its Informal Settler Families Unit conducted research on the short-term impact of the programme on the well-being of families that had been relocated to ten resettlement sites between 2013 and August 2014. Thus, as every resettlement practitioner knows, involuntary relocation of families incurs many accompanying risks to life and livelihood whose impact can only be mitigated if the government carries this out under a social development lens. They also mentioned getting back their pride by moving on from being squatters to home-owners.īut nothing could be more dramatic than leaving the place that for a long time you consider your home regardless of how dismal the situation is, and establishing a new life in an environment that has been chosen for you. In their view, if there was ever a reason to give up their present living conditions – apart from leaving the danger areas – it was to start their life anew and escape chronic poverty by getting some fresh opportunities that relocation could offer them. There are some 104,000 affected families with an average household size of slightly more than five persons and an average family income below the official poverty line. This willingness of the families who historically have been adamant about continuing to live in their dangerous dwellings is a development that the government has to take advantage of, especially in this country that has a lot to improve in practising just and humane demolition and eviction. They were quite willing to move out for their own safety, especially after the experience of Typhoon Ondoy in 2009 which flooded Metro Manila to a depth of 20-30 feet. In fact, the families did not take much convincing, partly because there is an allotted budget but mainly because the families themselves had had enough. The programme, called ‘One Safe Future’, is commendable as it aims to rescue families living alongside or on stilts in waterways. In the national capital region of Metro Manila, for instance, where the population has grown in part due to economic migrations of families from distant rural parts of the country, the administration launched a five-year housing programme (2011-16) to relocate families living in danger, from high-risk areas that are not suitable for housing to safer ground. This renewal entails the uprooting of families from one place and transplanting them to government-prepared relocation sites. Left and right, national and local, there have been initiatives and efforts to fix the defect in the country’s shield against disaster by re-thinking its urban and rural land use. Changes can now be seen in the strengthening of disaster risk reduction programmes, the formulation of preventive action plans from the upper to lower tier of the leadership, and the establishment of coordinating councils to facilitate the fast dissemination of information. As for the Philippines, whether one calls it an act of nature or climate change, experiences of disasters have imposed the need on the government and its policymakers to prepare in terms of laws and policies (either enforcing those that exist or creating new ones) to prepare the country. The world is dealing with the reality that it had never been as vulnerable to calamity as it is now, due to climate change. Typhoon Yolanda had found its place in human history as the strongest typhoon ever formed and had notoriously become the evil face of climate change. In 2013 Typhoon Yolanda (internationally named ‘Haiyan’) put the Philippines on the television screens of the entire world when it drove the country to its knees, with a toll in lives in the thousands and damage to property in the tens of billions of dollars.
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