Misery in Manila shows need for better planning

The flooding in Manila will hit home for Filipinos in the UAE, and should concern us all.

Most of Manila was under water this week, two metres of it in some neighbourhoods. At least 780,000 fled their homes; 300,000 people took shelter in 500 evacuation centres; in all, two million residents were directly affected. And the monsoon season is only half finished.

The scope of the suffering and loss imposed on the city's people has been extraordinary, as water disrupted every aspect of daily life. At least 20 have died, nine of them in a suburban landslide. As so often happens in such crises around the world, the poorest, living in crowded shantytowns, have been the hardest-hit. Manila's mayor declared a state of calamity. Officials called for volunteers to help distribute food and other essentials. The president ordered price monitoring to discourage gouging on basic goods. And everyone keeps anxiously peering up at the cloudy skies.

Meanwhile in the UAE, where rain is rarely a worry, the agony of Manila is shared by tens of thousands of Filipinos here. Most of these expatriates are sending money home, to Manila and all parts of the country, to help relatives there build or improve their homes or, in one way or another, their lives. Nobody can say how much of this hard-earned remittance money has been washed uselessly away by the flooding, but even without precise figures, the damage done by the water is heartbreaking.

Heavy rain is no surprise in the Philippines - the country typically gets at least 20 typhoons a year - and some claim that global climate change is making the problem worse. Even if that view is wrong, clearly more can be done to diminish the effect of extreme rains, in Manila and across the country. To be sure, the country is a poor one, but that does not excuse the official failure to learn from history, notably from the 2009 Manila flooding which killed at least 460.

Despite solemn promises made then, low-lying shantytowns continue to grow, and rubbish dumped by their residents clogs drainage canals and sewers. Around the city, meanwhile, forested areas capable of retaining water in the soil, are being cleared to build suburbs for the affluent.

Only the world's richest cities have comprehensive flood-prevention and -control plans. But the cost of reforesting, resettling squatters, building water-control works and the like is in the long run lower than the costs and misery imposed by recurrent flooding.