The houses built to survive floods

By Gab MejiaFeatures correspondent

The Manobo indigenous people live and thrive on a vast wetland in the Philippines – despite dealing with dozens of storms and floods per year. What can we learn from them?

Marites Babanto, a leader of the Manobo indigenous community in the southern Philippines, still remembers the time a terrible typhoon struck her village in 2012. Rainfall made the water levels of the Agusan Marshlands, a sprawling wetland area of rivers, lakes and swamps where Babanto and her community live, rise by 33ft (10m), the height of a three-storey house. But the villagers' homes, instead of being flooded, simply rose with the water, thanks to an ingenious ancient technique that allows them to float.

"Our community has never experienced a storm like this. The winds howled so loudly, and the rain poured for hours. We gathered everyone together to cower inside the floating tribal hall just hoping for the best," says Babanto, recalling the onslaught.

Known as Typhoon Bopha or Typhoon Pablo, the storm killed close to 2,000 people and caused widespread destruction when it ripped through the Philippines in 2012. However, when Babanto and her neighbours assessed the impact on their own community, they found that their homes were still intact. They are built on floating platforms as a traditional way of coping with regular floods and storms, and the method proved resilient even in the face of this exceptionally powerful typhoon.

The Manobos' floating homes, along with a range of other inventions and practices that allow them to live in the transition zone between land and water, are attracting growing interest from researchers who see important lessons for other communities adapting to and preparing for ever more extreme weather.

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A floating world

In the Agusan Marshlands, where around 290,000 members of the Manobo community live, life revolves around the wetlands and water. There are no roads or pavements; instead, homes and neighbourhoods are linked by rivers and lakes.

As Babanto goes about her day, she paddles through her neighbourhood in a baroto, a traditional wooden canoe. She glides past family homes, tribal gathering halls, schools, chapels and animal farms, all floating. She steers the canoe through a sacred lake in the centre of the Agusan Marsh, the largest and most pristine freshwater wetland in the Philippines, and offers a prayer to the marsh. Then she paddles to her tiny floating animal pens to feed her ducks, chickens, and pigs. She tidies her floating house, does her laundry on the porch, and sends her nieces and nephews to school aboard their own tiny barotos.

The floating communities are a practical solution to living in a marshland with meandering rivers, lakes that grow and shrink with the seasons, and no permanently dry, firm ground to build on.

Flooding is an annual event in the marsh communities, as seasonal rainfall in the months from December to March raises the water level. In dry seasons, the water recedes. To adapt to this extreme fluctuation, the community traditionally builds houses with one or two floors on raft-like platforms made of bamboo and balsa wood. The wood floats thanks to natural air pockets. The platforms are anchored using heavy-duty ropes and vines coiled around bangkal trees, a native wetland tree that grows submerged in the middle of the flood-filled lake and swamps.

"As long as these trees remain, our houses can thrive [despite] the flood," Babanto says. She says she is more fearful of the increasing strength of gales than the more frequent floods. In fact, she sees a potential benefit to the floods: "The more water there is, the more fish we can catch."

As scientists warn that climate change is making storms and floods more frequent, intense and powerful, the potential benefits of floating homes are gaining attention beyond the traditional communities that invented them. In archipelagic countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia, floating houses are being considered as a potential solution for urban communities threatened by floods and rising sea levels. Countries like the Netherlands and New Zealand have developed modern floating houses, reinforced with steel and concrete, to adapt to fluctuating water levels and catastrophic winds. 

Living between land and water

Francisca Mejia is a Filipina architect and urban design researcher at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. She argues the world needs to look more to indigenous cultures such as the Manobo in how it approaches tackling climate change and its impacts. However, she cautions that indigenous inventions such as the floating homes can only be fully understood as part of a wider belief system tied to indigenous communities' preservation of nature and land.

"A backbone of care, needed today in the climate crisis, already exists in the worldviews of the indigenous people," she says. Such care has allowed them to "prevail through millennia", she adds.

Similarly, she emphasises that it is not just one specific material or technique that makes the floating houses resilient, but rather, the fundamental way the Manobo and other indigenous peoples in the Philippines approach designing buildings, in tune with their environment. "Extreme climate phenomena like floods, storms, and now droughts have also evolved their ways of building," Mejia says. "But the foundational 'design tenets' of these remain the same." These include the use of renewable local materials, a dynamic, flexible wooden structure that bends and floats to accommodate the elements of nature, and also, a tradition of designing and creating the houses together, as a community, she says. She describes how the resulting structure accommodates nature in many ways: the steeply pitched roof allows water to run off and cool the house in the hottest months; the floating system means the entire house rises and sinks with the water and can even be moved to another part of the marsh if necessary; and during more stable weather seasons, they link up their houses to keep the community secure. 

The main core structure is "made of bamboo or endemic hardwood", she says, while roofs, walls, and ceilings are usually made of thatched nipa, rattan or palm leaves woven together. As well as being durable but biodegradable once discarded, "they are easily repaired as they are grown locally in their immediate environment," she says.

The floating communities are part of the Agusan Marshlands Wildlife Sanctuary, a protected area of some 14,800  hectares (36,600 acres) with swamps, peatland and 59 lakes, nestled in the heart of Mindanao, the Philippines second largest island. The area holds at least 15% of all freshwater found in the Philippines. Its ability to absorb floods, which fill up the lakes and are soaked up by the spongey ground, is also of crucial wider importance in the Philippines, which is struck by an average of 20 major storms, typically accompanied by floods, every year.

For the Manobo, and other local communities in the marshlands, fishing is a main source of livelihood, and is also intertwined with spiritual and cultural practices that honour the ecosystem and their own place in it. They celebrate the wetland creatures around them with blessings, songs, and prayers.

"The saltwater crocodiles, freshwater fish, and migratory birds are the original inhabitants of the marsh, much like our ancestors, spirits and deities who depend on these waters," says Datu Durango, the tribal chieftain of the Manobo's ancestral domain in Lake Benoni, deep in the marshlands.

Tradition and change

The fisherfolk wake up before dawn and steer their barotos or gas-powered boats into the deeper parts of the lakes, to fish and check on fish pens made of woven screens. They bring back enough fish to feed their families, and share any surplus with their neighbours or sell it to fish markets. This communal practice and traditional form of fishing and aquaculture is similar to methods found in other indigenous communities in the Philippines, such as the T’boli indigenous people in Lake Sebu or the Sama indigenous people in the Sulu islands.

Sustainability is at the core of some of these practices, though communities have also experimented with newer and at times less sustainable practices. For example, traditionally, the Manobo use methods such as catching fish with their bare hands, targeting only larger fish and allowing stocks to remain stable. However, some newer methods such as nets do catch smaller fish, contradicting the old, more sustainable ways. Similarly, the traditional time for harvesting edible water lilies is the flooding season, when the plants are fully grown, to ensure the overall stock is not put at risk.

Overall, the intricate web of wetland-based fishing, housing and environmental stewardship has remained remarkably intact, says Ivan Henares, a cultural policy researcher and assistant professor at the Asian Institute of Tourism of the University of the Philippines, Diliman.

"This awareness [of their environment] coupled with their confidence in their own indigenous knowledge and practices […] has ensured the Agusan Manobo's continued survival for a very long time," says Henares, who is also the secretary general of the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, and has worked with the Manobo community for a decade.

However, while their houses have resisted storms and floods, the community is not immune to the wider consequences of global warming. Henares and other researchers have highlighted threats such as prolonged droughts, while demand for palm oil has led to peatlands being drained and turned into farmland. In addition, timber poaching is threatening endangered and endemic trees, according to the researchers. They also express concerns over violence against those fighting to protect the marshlands, and point out that an environmental officer was murdered by timber-poachers in November 2020.

Michael Sabacajan is the head of the Municipal Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office in Talacogon, one of the six municipalities in the Agusan Marshlands. He says the Manobo people were adaptive and resilient to flooding long before local offices such as his were conceived.  "But it is only recently that there has been erratic shifts in the timing of the flooding periods and the increasing frequency of super-typhoons happening in the marshlands amid this ecological crisis," he adds.

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In recent years, the Manobo, whose entire existence relies on water, have found themselves facing another rising threat: water shortages.

Droughts caused by extreme heat can make it difficult for them to traverse the tributaries and pathways to neighbouring floating communities and inland peripheries, where large-scale fish markets, farmlands and higher-education institutions are located.

Datu Boyet Reyes, who has served for more than 25 years as the tribal Manobo chieftain of Lake Panlabuhan in the Agusan Marshlands, has witnessed his community adapt to the changing landscapes first-hand. In his view, helping the community confront and solve these challenges starts with acknowledging the skills and way of life that have allowed them to survive for so long. He also urges non-Manobo to consider their own use of resources, and how this might affect indigenous communities.

"We need to be respected and included, because the houses you [non-Manobo] continue to build still come from the same soil, trees, and waters we protect," says Boyet Reyes. "If we find ways to help and protect our waters, this water will also find ways to help us. It is its nature." After all, he says, that's the meaning of the name of the marshlands, "Agusan": it means  "where the water flows".

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