Hundreds of fishermen and their families who have settled in precarious floating houses north of Manila Bay in the Philippines suffer an environmental and urban siege due to the rise in sea level, the construction of an airport and the tons of drifting garbage that choke their livelihood.
Vincent Omolida, 41, and his wife, Melissa Salvación, 37, live in the Sitio Pariahan settlement, about 30 kilometers north of Manila. Four years ago, before the relentless rise of the waters, they had to abandon their house and build a new home a few hundred meters further back in a row of dilapidated and windowless shacks.
It was unprotected from the onslaught of typhoons and storms.
“We have raised the walls of the house several times in recent years, and even so the water enters when there are storms,” Melissa told EFE while pointing at the patched walls of her house, in this new settlement they call “Salvation.”
In Manila Bay, sea levels are rising four times faster than the global average as the city sinks due to massive pumping of groundwater from years of frenetic urban development, according to Greenpeace data released this year.
The mangroves that regulated the tides and erected a natural barrier to these coastal towns against storms – increasingly frequent and intense – have disappeared due to the construction of an international airport in the same area of Bulacan, where these neighborhoods are located.
“There are areas in Manila Bay where the land sinks about 10 centimeters a year. In a decade, 86 percent of the population of Metro Manila (some 13 million inhabitants) may be affected,” said Rhea Jane, of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities.