Parents accompany their children from school after their classes in Manila on April 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Thousands of schools in the Philippines suspended in-person classes on April 5, the Education Department said, as parts of the tropical country endured dangerously high temperatures.

The months of March, April and May are typically the hottest and driest in the archipelago nation but conditions have been exacerbated by the El Nino weather phenomenon. Many schools have no air-conditioning, leaving students to swelter in crowded, poorly ventilated classrooms.

“Even my smartest student is not in the mood to answer questions because it’s very hot,” said Mayette Paulino, who teaches a grade two class of around 27 children near Manila. She said “students feel tired and seem sleepy” as the heat intensified in the afternoon.

The Department of Education has issued an advisory giving school heads the power to decide when to switch to remote learning “in cases of extreme heat and other calamities”.

Official figures for April 5 showed 5,288 schools suspended in-person classes, affecting more than 3.6 million students. That was higher than the 4,769 schools on April 4. Some schools have reduced class hours to avoid teaching during the hottest times of the day.

Bheapril Balbin, 37, whose two young children attend a primary school near Manila, supported the decision for students to stay home during the hot weather. “The heat is too much, my children couldn’t take it,” Bheapril told AFP.

“Some of their classmates got sick, they had a headache because of the extreme heat. My youngest has an asthma, extreme heat is bad for him.”

“The heat index was expected to reach the “danger” level of 42 or 43 degrees Celsius (107.6-109.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in several areas of the country on Friday,” the state weather forecaster said.

In Manila, the heat index was forecast to hit the “extreme caution” level of up to 40C (104F), when heat cramps and exhaustion are possible. The country’s heat index measures what a temperature feels like, taking into account humidity. Friday’s actual maximum temperature in Manila was 35.5C (95.9F).

“The heat will get worse because we’re not yet at the peak of the summer season,” Lorie Dela Cruz of the state weather forecaster told AFP, noting the first half of May was usually the hottest period. She said the actual temperature was “within the normal range” for this time of year. Nearly 300 schools in Manila had remote learning on April 5.

The central regions of the main island of Luzon were the hardest hit, with more than 1,600 schools suspending in-person classes. Save the Children Philippines chief Alberto Muyot said on Wednesday the extreme heat meant “children are simply unable to concentrate in the classroom and their health is also at risk”.

At least 11 people were injured when a rain-induced landslide buried two buses picking up workers from a gold mine in the southern Philippines, officials said.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Faulty warning systems, poverty and deforestation of mountains in the southern Philippines turned recent unseasonably heavy rains into deadly disasters, scientists said in a report Friday.

More than 100 people were killed in landslides and floods in January and February on the country’s second-largest island of Mindanao as the northeast monsoon and a low pressure trough brought downpours.

A study by the World Weather Attribution group found the unsually heavy rain in eastern Mindanao was not “particularly extreme”.

But with people living in landslide-prone areas and shortcomings in weather alerts, the rains became “devastating”.

“We can’t just blame the rain for the severe impacts,” said Richard Ybanez, chief science research specialist at the University of the Philippines’ Resilience Institute.

“A range of human factors is what turned these downpours into deadly disasters.”

In the deadliest incident, more than 90 people were killed when the side of a mountain collapsed and smashed into a gold mining village on February 6, burying buses and houses.

While climate change was likely one of the drivers of the heavy rain, the report said scientists were not able to quantify its impact due to the lack of available data.

“However, we did detect a strong trend in the historical data — compared to the pre-industrial climate, the heaviest five-day periods of rainfall now drop around 50% more rainfall on Mindanao island in the December to February period,” said Mariam Zachariah of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

The scientists found that a higher-than-average rate of poverty in the mountainous region had left people vulnerable to the impacts of heavier rainfall, while “intensified deforestation” had increased the risk of landslides.

“Across the region of study, construction in areas declared ‘no-build zones’ raises these dangers considerably,” the report said.

The report said policies, laws and funding of disaster risk management “have largely stalled over the past decades” and were concentrated on post-disaster response.

For example, automated sensors for rainfall and stream level in the region “have not been recording data since at least 2022”, after funding for maintenance and data transmission was cut.

The report also faulted the country’s weather forecasts and warnings, which “have limited granularity on local risk and lack instructions on where and when to evacuate”.

“Evacuations from high-risk locations were carried out when the island was hit by the rainfall in late January. However, many people were still in harm’s way,” said Mr. Ybanez.

“It is critical that both early warning systems and assessment of landslide-prone areas are improved to avoid similar disasters in the future,” he said.

The report also warned that the recent rains would have been “more extreme” were it not for the El Nino weather phenomenon causing drier conditions across the country.

The tropical archipelago nation — which is ranked among the most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change — is usually affected by around 20 major storms a year.