Hagupit follows Haiyan's path

Media reported scattered injuries and up to four deaths since Hagupit made landfall, moving west-northwest across the Philippines at 15 kilometers per hour and blowing sustained 90-mile-per-hour winds, after weakening from a Category 5 storm to Category 2. Officials expressed relief at the low death and injury toll so far, but they also warned that Hagupit - Tagalog for "smash" or "lash" - remains on course to barrel across three major central islands before starting to blow away Tuesday into the South China Sea. Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman said that several typhoon-lashed eastern villages had fallen out of contact owing to downed telephone and power lines.

Up to a million people sought shelter in about 1,000 public facilities. The government also put the country's 120,000-member military at the ready to respond to emergencies.

The Philippines endures about 20 major storms annually, which regularly claim lives and have become more unpredictable because of climate change, according to the UN and many scientists. Environmentalist and humanitarian groups have expressed hope that the typhoon would spur action at the UN climate talks in Lima, where almost 200 nations have attempted to work out an accord to slow global warming, set for signing at a summit in Paris next December.

"My country is under water, farms have been wiped away, homes destroyed, families separated," Shubert Ciencia, of the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement, said in Lima on Saturday. "Nobody should have to live under the threat of destruction year after year," Ciencia added. "But we want action, not pity. Negotiators have a chance to make history by standing up for those who have already lost so much and the millions more who will suffer the same fate unless we act now."

'The critical issue'

In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan - with winds of 315 kilometers per hour, the strongest storm ever recorded on land and last year's deadliest disaster - killed 7,300 people and displaced a further 4 million. In 2011 and 2012, consecutive December storms, the world's deadliest disasters of those years, together claimed more than 3,000 lives. Another typhoon this July killed more than 100 people.

Many readily evacuated this time around, Social Work Secretary Corazon Soliman said on Sunday: "Haiyan was the best teacher of all. People did not need much convincing to move to safety. In fact many of them volunteered to go."

Now, Soliman said, there is a new concern: "The critical issue is in evacuation centers where there is a high number of evacuees. We are concerned that the congestion will cause more threat on health."

mkg/mg (Reuters, AFP, dpa, AP)