"Hot" topic

Last Thursday, I keynoted the 3rd General Assembly of Philippine Science Journalists at PHIVOLCS. This year's gathering centered on the issue of global warming, and how human activity has severely altered the environment and caused the drastic climate changes we are now experiencing today.

Grim scenarios of hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding are predicted by scientists as the world gets warmer. A World Bank expert said that if global emission of greenhouse gases continues unchecked, the devastation could equal the loss of two World Wars and the Depression combined, or in financial terms about $7 trillion.

The issue of global warming, although very well-known now in the Western world, seems to be a mere extraneous concern in the Philippines. We dwell on politics and personalities, on scandal and conflict, but environmental issues seldom win our attention.

I blame our failure to generate interest in important scientific and environment issues on the unfortunate status of the country in terms of science and technology and R&D, as well as the sad state of public education.

Global warming is one of the biggest threats to the world's nations, if not to the entire human civilization. Tackling the problem of climate change requires scientific knowledge and extensive research - two things in which our country is terribly lagging behind.

This boils down to the issue of competency in science, technology and engineering research. The country has the lowest number of scientists and engineers doing R&D, with only 108 per one million population, compared to Singapore's 4,613 and Malaysia's 726. China and India are emerging as technology titans, with India producing 350,000 engineers and China producing 600,000 annually - which when combined surpasses the number of engineering graduates produced by the US by more than tenfold.

In addition, more than 50% of Science teachers in our public schools are not actually holders of a degree in the subject they teach. How can we expect our students to learn physics from teachers who themselves have no mastery of the subject?

Government and private sector alike must make immediate efforts to raise our country's competency in science and math if we do not want to find ourselves intellectually bankrupt as a nation and severely unprepared for the challenges of the future - be it global warming or national development itself.