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365 Days of Climate Awareness 225 — Impacts on Philippine Agriculture
The Philippines sit entirely in the tropics, and the northwest Pacific is one of the most active areas in the world for cyclones.
The Philippines sit entirely in the tropics, and the northwest Pacific is one of the most active areas in the world for cyclones. Furthermore, the impacts of ENSO are large across the Philippine islands: La Niña tends to bring rain, and El Niño to bring drier weather. These effects have been tracked in recent years, along with fundamental variables like air and sea temperature. The resulting picture is complex.
Air and sea surface temperature trends are unambiguous, showing increases throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. One of the fundamental components of climate change analysis, including the concept of “global weirding”, is that increases in heat content in atmosphere and ocean, by adding energy to the climate system, should result in more frequent and energetic storms and rainfall. And while this is to some extent true around the world, in reality the global climate response is not a simple linear increase. That is the case in the northern Pacific as well.
