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Choosing devils pragmatically: on precolonial sustainability
Someone wrote to me recently asking my opinion on why the Philippines doesn’t appear — despite being the most climate-vulnerable place in the world — to have any implemented or ongoing national or regional plan for climate adaptation and mitigation. They had been researching various regions for a while and when they had come across the Philippines, they thought they must have missed something.
They happened to reach out to me as the country was being battered by a previously-improbable six typhoons in a single month between mid-October and mid-November 2024, capping the horror pageant with Supertyphoon Pepito.
It’s a legitimate question.
If you look, you’ll find few words and fewer implementations.
If you ask Filipinos, you’ll find very few people — let alone professionals or politicians — with any major concerns around the lack of real coordinated implementations regionally or nationally. They won’t know any details about implementation plans, but they’ll direct you to the Climate Change Commission, or the The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan. Perhaps a well-connected individual might mention some non-governmental organisations like the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, or individual politicians like Senator Loren Legarda.
