While local governments may hesitate to prevent the poor from building shanties along the banks of creeks and rivers, there is a law that prohibits that, according to Meliton B. Juanico, an urban and environmental planner who chairs the Department of Geology at the University of the Philippines (UP). Juanico acknowledges the reasons these poor families have in living along these waterways but, he said, “an effective leader should have the political will to implement the law and the imagination to deal with the needs of those affected.”

Moreover, lax implementation of zoning laws has allowed commercial establishments to put up structures on esteros.

Another law — Presidential Decree 705, or the Revised Forestry Code – prohibits the building of houses and residential development on slopes of more than 10 degrees. But developers are able to get away with it and the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) has been approving development plans that violate this law, Juanico said.

“The demand for subdivisions with scenic vistas is high,” Juanico pointed out, “and as a result many developers look to areas like Rodriguez or San Mateo” — both in Rizal province, the hardest hit by Ondoy. He explained that developing areas for housing on slopes of more than 10 degrees results in serious erosion of the soil.

And to think, Juanico added, that the Sierra Madre, at the foot of which the towns of Rodriguez and San Mateo are located, is now denuded and not able to catch most of the rainwater that eventually flows down to Metro Manila. (Read sidebar: Why Rizal Province Suffered Greatly from Ondoy)

Thapan, of the ADB, agrees that as far as zoning and development controls go, “there has been a weakness in that respect, in so far as city management is concerned and requires strengthening.”

Lack of Foresight

Fouad Bendimerad, an engineer who chairs the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative, a nonprofit group that advises governments around the world on disaster management, rues the fact that the Philippines is so battered by disasters that it hardly has time to create, let alone implement, master plans. “What is happening is that we are constantly reacting to the disaster that is happening,” he said in a phone interview from Bangkok. The government, he said, “is always in reaction mode and that takes all the resources.”

Bendimerad also recalled how a comprehensive earthquake disaster plan that he and his team developed between 2005 and 2007, with funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and other agencies, remained unimplemented for lack of funds.

Juanico, of the UP’s geography department, agrees. “We are good at making plans but are bad at implementing them,” he said in an interview.

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