
THE MARCOS administration should allocate more funds to climate change mitigation to reduce the damage wrought by disasters, environmental groups said on Wednesday.
“We are concerned that the government is not paying enough attention or allocating enough resources to dealing with typhoons even before they start as low pressure areas,” Gerry Arances, executive director of the Center for Energy, Ecology and Development (CEED) said in a Viber message.
“Disasters are inevitable… meeting the challenge of disasters is limited to preparing infrastructure and responses for natural calamities,” he said.
“Whether it’s transitioning to renewable energy, painting our roofs white to reflect sunlight or planting new mangrove forests to barricade our coasts from more intense storms, investing in ‘prevention’ is smarter than trying to put out more and more fires,” Gregg Yan, founder and executive director of environmental group Best Alternatives, said in an e-mail.
Echoing the sentiment, Mr. Arances said that the impact of disasters will not be avoided by simply building typhoon-resistant infrastructure.
“We need to change the mindset that disasters are inevitable, and that meeting the challenge of disasters is limited to preparing infrastructure and responses for natural calamities,” he said, adding that the intensity and frequency of typhoons “will only get worse with time if we continue to burn fossil fuels and refuse an immediate transition to renewable energy.”
“Without a meaningful transition compliant with climate science, all the current mindsets will produce is an arms race between more powerful typhoons and even more infrastructure trying to meet them,” Mr. Arances said.
The government seeks P543.45 billion for climate change-related spending, but a huge bulk of it (P294.46 billion) will be allocated for “water sufficiency projects,” while P180.7 billion will be for sustainable energy projects, Budget Secretary Amenah F. Pangandaman said in August.
Research group IBON Foundation had criticized that “the biggest expense item is not straightforward about what they’re really about.”
Meanwhile, P2.5 billion will be for the rehabilitation of 31,992 hectares of forests, P181 million for the Clean Air Program and P198 million for the Clean Water Program.
Under the 2024 National Expenditure Plan (NEP), the proposed calamity fund is at P31 billion.
Climate change could cut the Philippines’ economic output by 13.6% by 2040, the World Bank said in a report last year. — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz