Walking the talk: The UN summit and Aquino’s climate legacy

Before midnight on September 23, Manila time, President Aquino will be announcing the country’s actions on climate change in a United Nations summit in New York.

 

If many Filipinos tune in to listen to his speech, it will not be to hear about how we are resilient as a people, and how we are recovering from super typhoon Yolanda or even tropical storm Mario, which just struck the country last Friday. We already know we are resilient in the face of so many disasters, and that our spirit is waterproof. No, what we really want to know from the President is how the government plans to go beyond recovering and rehabilitating year after year.

 

A recent global study by the Norwegian Refugee Council found that natural disasters have displaced three times more people last year compared to war. It stated that 5.8 million Filipinos lost their homes because of tropical storm Maring, the Visayas earthquake, and Yolanda.

 

But then again, there are no natural disasters. We do not have a shortage of problems which, as in the case of Yolanda, made people living by the coast even more vulnerable to typhoons and storm surges.

 

In the ‘new normal,’ climate change is already loading the dice for stronger and more frequent typhoons and other extreme weather events. The warming waters are not only providing more fuel for storms; the oceans are acidifying and killing coral reefs in the process. The sea levels across the country are rising three times more than the global average, according to the World Meteorological Association, which will also elevate storm surges. And even our government agencies have warned that in the years to come, some parts of the country will suffer from extreme heat events while others will contend with extreme rainfall.

 

The government has made strides towards responding to these risks, especially since a tropical storm hit Luzon almost five years ago. The Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act, signed into law the year after Ondoy, reflected the shifting mindset from responding to (or “coordinating”) disasters to finding out why a typhoon or earthquake, for example, became a disaster.

 

The Climate Change Act, which was passed even earlier, created the Climate Change Commission (CCC) and led to the writing of a National Climate Change Action Plan. This law was amended in 2012 to build a People’s Survival Fund, which will support the climate change adaptation efforts of local governments and communities.

 

Even now, in Mario’s wake, we continue to see more national agencies and local government units stepping up to the challenge of the new normal; Project NOAH and Albay are only two of these many success stories. And countless civil society groups, businesses, and even private citizens have kept the spirit of bayanihan alive.

 

While President Aquino can be proud about the government doing several things right, he can certainly do much more, especially as the chair of the Climate Change Commission. He has convened the entire Commission only once, and he needs to show climate leadership so that other agencies would take the CCC and the climate plan seriously.

 

He can lead the Commission in supporting the local government units’ preparation and implementation of their own climate plans, and provide hope to the survivors of Yolanda that their communities will be better prepared for the new normal.

 

The President needs to stop dilly-dallying and resolve his administration’s incoherent climate policies. Why does he promote the building of more coal-fired power plants in the country while boasting about the plan to triple our renewable energy by 2030?

 

And why is he looking at a Climate Resilience Fund when he has not even signed the implementing rules and regulations of the already-existing People’s Survival Fund?

 

President Aquino will only have four minutes in his speech to the United Nations. But he still has more than a year left in his tenure to remedy his administration’s short-sighted approach to climate risks. More than his words, his actions will prove whether he can rise up to the challenge brought on by the new normal, and leave behind a legacy of real resilience.

 

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Denise M. Fontanilla is the advocacy officer of the civil society network Aksyon Klima Pilipinas. She may be reached at aksyonklima.sec@gmail.com or via Twitter @denisemf_.

The opinions expressed in this contributed article are solely the author's own.