Deforestation Led To Deadly Phillipines Landslide

"According to official records, the government of the Philippines knew as early as last May that this village in the eastern part of the country, where more than 1,000 people may have died in a landslide Friday, was in grave danger.

Policies were even in place to avert a pending disaster: area villages were evacuated late last year and a logging ban, to address the deforestation that helped cause the problem, had been adopted more than a decade ago.

...The underlying problem of deforestation also reflected policy failures, critics said...the logging ban already in place is widely seen as ineffective. Endemic corruption, lack of resources and weak law enforcement have allowed illegal logging to flourish and environmental predators to go unpunished, critics said."