Firstly, let’s go back to the time of learning about water cycle in high school, how the rain is happen; when the process called evaporation and evapotranspiration happen, it become condensed and precipitate as the rain to the earth. And then it goes over all the objects matter on earth and if there is no vegetative cover, the rainfall runoff will splash over the soil and the strong rain will make land erosion and finally it would deposit in the river and the flooding will come as a result. If there were forest cover, the roots and its debris (biomass) will make the speed of falling rain slowly and it will absorb the water like the sponge. The meaning is that, tree is like a sponge, it absorbs water in the rainy season or if we pour the water to it, they absorb and then they move out the water in the dry season after using some water for nitrification. That’s why if we do have the trees or forest, it keep us away from heat and suffering drought.

For drought, in Myanmar, we have planted the tree species called “Htanaung”, “Kandaryasein”, “Tamar”, “Eucalypt”, so on. These are the species of trees that don’t need much water to grow up. But among these trees, Eucalypt was known as not shouldn’t try to grow trees. At first, we have planted so many acres of that as it is the fast growing trees and we can harvest it early. But after some of the researchers pointed about this species like; this species eat more nutrient than any other plant as it has complicated deep root network and absorb much water. Also it does not support for the improvement of soil nutrient (leaves are not decomposed easily). Based on these facts, people claimed not to plant this tree species as this is not effective for our environment. Also this is not the local tree species. Mix planting this species with other food plants also gave bad outcomes as the outputs of food plants were not as usual and less than before.

In case of flood, this is partly the result of deforestation and partly human mistakes. There are many types of flood, in the matter of urban floods; my point of view is because of the garbage and bad management of drainage system. I have been conquered with the worst cyclone “Nargis” but this is the natural kind of disaster. Recently, I faced the huge water falling down through my street and it was like river. I have never seen this kind of floods. At that time what I remembered is the person who is running the street food shop and he is dumping his leftover and plastic bags into the drainage. Also, what I was found out on social media was the engineer’s comment over poor drainage design. That was amazed thing for me to hear about that. 

We should more care about that and many people did carelessly in the past. Although this should have been done early in the past, we are not late yet, we can save the world as much as we can. Even in our daily lives, if we would save the water, electricity in the way of we can and throw the rubbish systematically, you are one of the conservationist. Government should also not pay less attention on that. We do need sound management system for saving our earth; we do need more environmental awareness campaign on every sub-theme like water, air, soil, and electricity. Besides knowing of all things, we should have to practice and share with colleagues, peers, and to all our connections.

Photo source: google