Preserving highland watershed also prevents lowland flooding

Difference of a forested bare watershed.
With a bare watershed, the surface run
off is 30times greater resulting to greater
flooding at the bottom.

Protecting the highland water basins of the Cordilleras and Sierra Madre will help address the perennial flooding in the lowlands.

This was stressed by former Environment Secretary, now Climate Change Commissioner Heherson T. Alvarez, in a lecture before a gathering of local journalists during the Philippine Network of Environmental Journalist, Inc. (PNEJ) Media Workshop on Climate Change Adaptation in observance of the Climate Change Consciousness Week.

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“If we want to comprehensibly manage the perennial problem of massive flooding, we must focus on the source, the river basins, specifically of the Cordillera and the Sierra Madre, here in the North. Flooding in the lowlands is primarily a consequence of what happened in the highland water basins,” Alvarez said.

He said, “it is critical that we build a string of watersheds so more water is absorbed before they cascade downstream, to anticipate the volume of water before they become enormous and destructive.”

Alvarez explained that the Cordillera is the watershed cradle of Northern Luzon. Its forests sustain six major river systems namely the Abulog-Apayao, Chico, Magat, Abra, Amburayan-Naguilian-Aringay, and Agno-Bued which traverse the Cordillera provinces and drain into the lowlands.

He further said that Cordillera’s river basins have a total drainage area of almost 5.5 hectares and groundwater storage of about 150 million cubic meters which abundantly supply the irrigation and hydro-electric energy of Northern Luzon. - (PIA / by Joseph B Zambrano)

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