The giant white marble boulders that line the Agos River just north of the Philippine village of Daraitan are sacred to the Indigenous Dumagat people. They use the boulders to perform rituals to ward off sickness and keep their village safe. If the Kaliwa Dam is built upriver, the Dumagat say these rocks will be destroyed to make way for the increased water flow.
Ashley Westerman/NPR
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DARAITAN, Philippines — Nestled in the Sierra Madre more than two hours outside Manila, this village is lush and green — brought to life by the Agos River, which cuts through the unforgiving terrain like a quiet, slow-moving highway.
Daraitan is a tourist village of about 5,000, where children play in the river while the adults cook fish and fix their broken karaoke machines under makeshift tents on the banks.
“The community is peaceful. We have everything we need here,” Maria Clara Dullas, 43, tells NPR.
Dullas is a member of the Indigenous Dumagat people, who claim this area as their ancestral lands. Her family are farmers, like most in the area, and have lived off the land and the river for centuries.
But Daraitan is in danger of disappearing, under the waters that give it and its people life.
Some 40 miles downriver, the sprawling Metro Manila area and its more than 13 million people are facing a looming water shortage. It’s the result of an exploding population, human-caused climate change and, some would argue, poor planning on the part of officials over the years. The Philippine government commissioned the building of the Kaliwa Dam on the Agos River decades ago as part of a larger plan to help get more water to Manila. But construction finally broke ground last year, as officials amped up claims that the dam would alleviate water shortages that could hit the capital as early as next year.
Dullas, who is the president of Dumagat Women of Sierra Madre, has been leading the fight against the building of Kaliwa Dam for years. Though the dam will be built more than 6 miles upriver, once completed, the new water flow will submerge Daraitan and destroy precious sacred sites in the area, Dullas says. Despite her and her community’s efforts, the project is moving forward.
“It hurts us. It’s devastating,” she says.
Children play in the Agos River in the tourist village of Daraitan in the Philippines’ Rizal province. In late April, temperatures are high and the humidity is stifling — driving tourists and residents alike into the river’s cool, running waters.
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“This is just a matter of supply and demand projections,” Delfin Sespene, supervising engineer at Manila’s Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewage System, tells NPR. “We are building the Kaliwa Dam to augment our water supply in order to meet an increasing water demand.”
From dams in the Philippines to sea walls being built in Norfolk, Va., clashes are playing out all over the world as people try to adapt to the threats from climate change. The choices are acute in the global south: countries there, like the Philippines, are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather, but they often lack the resources or civil society safeguards to make sure solutions help people equitably.
The search for climate solutions frequently lays bare the fact that there could be winners and losers when it comes to decisions about protections and development. And in the case of dams like Kaliwa, it spotlights some shortcomings of a climate change solution that has been touted for decades.
Nature, exacerbated
The Kaliwa Dam was proposed as a project in 2012, and it’s part of a larger group of water supply projects centering on the Kaliwa River Watershed that have been in the works since the 1970s. The construction of the Kaliwa Dam finally began in 2022, three years after the Philippine government secured a development loan from China.
Today, officials say that if the dam is not built, the water crisis will leave the capital area without an adequate water supply starting next year, with a severe…
Read More: The Philippines builds a dam to address a water shortage : NPR