Philippines Climate
The islands have a tropical, hot and humid climate with an average temperature of almost 27 degrees Celsius. November to May is (actually) the dry season and June to October is the rainy season.
Especially in the months from May to July, the thermometer often reaches 38 degrees with high humidity (up to 81 percent), so that the heat is particularly troubling for people who do not have air conditioning. From June to October / November there are regular heavy downpours and typhoons, which cause different amounts of damage almost every year and leave swaths of devastation in the affected parts of the country. The northern Philippines are mainly affected by the typhoons occurring in the Pacific. Mindanao and the southern islands were (usually) hardly affected by it. The coolest and driest time is in the weeks from December to February – plenty of time to take a deep breath.
National and regional weather forecasts create Weather Forecast & Regional Weather.
According to a2zgov, the words “actually” and “as a rule” used above have been chosen with care: throughout the Philippines – including the southern main island of Mindanao – there are regularly devastating typhoons that leave numerous fatalities and immense material damage. For example, the tropical storms “Ketsana” (local name “Ondoy”) in September 2009 and “Washi” (local name “Sendong”) in the Christmas season 2011 in and around Manila and Mindanao (there were primarily the northern cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan) as well as on the eastern Visaya Islands caused terrible damage and claimed over 1,000 lives. In the summer of 2012 there was a series of devastating typhoons, this time mainly on the north island of Luzon (there among others in the Cordillera region) left swaths of devastation. At the beginning of December 2012 it was the typhoon “Bopha” (local name “Pablo”), which this time mainly in the Compostela Valley in central Mindanao caused enormous damage and also killed over 1,000 people.
The so far most powerful super typhoon “Haiyan” (local name “Yolanda”), which was ever measured, raced over the middle archipelago of the Visayas on November 8th 2013 with a speed of more than 300 kilometers per hour and made hundreds of thousands of people homeless overnight. The islands of Samar, Leyte (with the capital Tacloban), Bohol, where a month earlier a severe earthquake had already terrified people and damaged or collapsed numerous historic buildings and churches, Cebu, Negros were hardest hit this time and Panay.
It is feared that the number of victims will exceed 10,000, although the government in Manila has not yet confirmed such a number. In the first days after this gigantic catastrophe, there was no effective government aid, which led people to plunder department stores in order to get hold of food and water. The greater the extent of the damage, the more criticism arose in the population and in the national media. Local social activists named President Benigno S. Aquino III. simply as “irrelevant”, while Amando Doronila, a longtime and respected columnist of the Manila newspaper “Philippine Daily Inquirer”, called November 8th the day “the government disappeared from the scene”.
The reconstruction of the areas destroyed by “Haiyan” will take years and will also determine the reputation of the country’s political leadership. Unfortunately, no lessons were learned from the “Haiyan” disaster at the World Climate Conference in the Polish capital Warsaw two weeks later. On the contrary: numerous representatives of international environmental protection organizations accused the organizers of the conference of “word acrobatics” and left early in protest. Almost four years after this disaster, many people are still waiting for adequate government support. The politicians responsible for the reconstruction would rather devote themselves to their careers than take care of the “Haiyan” victims.
In all of these “cases” it was the poorest of the poor who suffered the most. Their dilapidated, partly provisional dwellings, often laid out along rivers and seashores, literally collapse like houses of cards under the strength of the storms and rain masses. The former police director Panfilo Lacson, who was responsible for the reconstruction and called “Rehabilitation Tsar” in the national media, increasingly relied on investments from large private companies. In the spring of 2015, however, he gave up his post and was re-elected Senator in the last general election on May 9, 2016. Meanwhile, the Department for Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)again under criticism of state auditing. Above all, the misdirection of aid funds and the slow use of funds for urgently needed emergency accommodation were criticized.
To this day, there have been repeated protests at which, above all, the slow acting of the responsible authorities is criticized. Even a so-called “no-go zone”, which stipulates that areas that are up to 40 meters from the sea shore, are not allowed to be settled, meet with criticism, especially among fishermen, because in their opinion this is their immediate concern due to the lack of alternatives Existence endangered.
