Only a month ago an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale had caused over 200 deaths in the Philippines. And then on Friday, the mother of all storms, Typhoon Haiyan, rampaged through this archipelago of over 7,000 islands. The Philippines is well used to the worst that nature can throw at it – it is hit by about 20 typhoons a year – but nothing could prepare its people for the Haiyan winds which peaked at 314km per hour and the sea surge that swept all before them. The storm is believed by some climatologists to have been the most powerful ever to make landfall.
In provincial capital Tacloban, a population of 220,000 has been left homeless, most of its houses little more than matchsticks, by a sea that rose some 13 feet. No power, no water. Decomposing bodies litter the streets. Along the coast fishing villages have disappeared. Elsewhere the scale of damage is simply not known as rescue parties have still not reached many communities. Overall the government estimates 10,000 dead, a figure that will certainly be an underestimate and may represent the toll in Tacloban alone, some 9.5 million affected, and 650,000 homeless. Forty-one of the country's 80 provinces have been hit.
The urgent challenge for the authorities and the strong international support that is being mobilised is for immediate relief – food, water, medicines and shelter – and voluntary contributions from the public will be crucially important. Ireland’s donation of €1 million is welcome but must only be a first.
Attempts to assess the longer-term economic damage to the fast-growing country are inevitably speculative, but its finance minister puts the likely effect at a moderate one percentage point of its expected growth of 6-7 per cent, just behind China’s. Although devastating to the communities that have been hit, they represent only about a fifth of the state’s population and just over a tenth of GNP. A report from German-based CEDIM Forensic Disaster Analysis puts the total cost at $8 billion- $19 billion.
But the storm and its aftermath are also a warning that must not be ignored. Although single events can’t be directly attributed to human-caused global warming, Haiyan was a brutal reminder that more of the same is on the way. Will Steffen, director of Australia’s National University Climate Change Institute, warns that climate change is causing surface waters to warm feeding energy into storms. “You can’t say that any single event, like the typhoon that hit the Philippines, was caused or even exacerbated by climate change. But you can say with some confidence that we’re loading the dice for more severe storms in the future.” As Philippines climate envoy Naderev “Yeb” Sano on Monday movingly warned delegates to the UN climate change conference in Warsaw, we must “stop this madness”.