Editor's letter: The sad aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan

last updated 8 January 2015

Families matter most in the response to Typhoon Haiyan, or Yolanda as it’s known in the Philippines. It killed at least 4,000 people and devastated a huge swath of cities, towns, and hamlets. Yet so little property was insured there that claims probably won’t exceed the $1.6 billion paid out for May’s tornado in Moore, Okla., which killed 23 people. For many of the storm’s 4 million displaced people, the most reliable long-term aid will come from the 10.5 million Filipinos living outside the country, 3.5 million of them in the U.S. alone. They provide a seventh of the Philippines’ economic output; count in unofficial remittances and that share grows to more than a third. Those funds aren’t equal to this tragedy, but they make a difference. The mother of my sister-in-law, Joy, came to California decades ago, but she’s paid for years to reinforce the house where her sister and father still live. It is now pretty much the only edifice still standing in their village, providing shelter for family and neighbors alike.

Poorer, low-lying, tropical countries like the Philippines argue that they bear the brunt of the climate change caused by almost two centuries of carbon emissions from Europe and North America (see Talking points). They want official compensation, and in a just world maybe they’d get it. But they won’t, and they know it. They can only hope that remittances flow more freely than ever to the Philippines amid its current catastrophe. In the long run, family ties are more trustworthy than foreign governments and aid organizations, which will inevitably be called upon during the next disaster, somewhere else where most houses are built of wood, mud, or straw.