Efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development in the Philippines will go in vain unless measures are undertaken to help poor and highly vulnerable communities adapt to climate change and reduce their risk to weather-related disasters.
Secretary Emmanuel de Guzman of the Climate Change Commission (CCC), in news statement, issued warning as he underscored the need to integrate disaster-risk reduction (DRR) and climate-change adaptation (CCA) into development policies, plans and programs of the national government (NG) and local government units (LGUs), especially in areas that are highly susceptible to the global phenomenon.
“There are evidence showing that the poor are the worst hit in weather-related disasters. Unless the government comes out with climate-risk sensitive development plans, efforts to reduce poverty are at risk of stalling or even of losing hard-won gains,” de Guzman said at the third leg of the Communities for Resilience (CORE) Convergence Forum held in Bohol province on July 27 and 28.
CORE is a flagship CCC program which aims to increase competencies of LGUs on risk information database; competency development on disaster-risk management; CCA and mitigation; and mainstreaming of climate change and DRR in local development planning and knowledge management.
According to de Guzman, the opportunity to end poverty will be lost if the government fails to integrate adaptation to climate change into its poverty-reduction initiatives.
He said the nation’s poor, particularly farmers and fishermen, suffer the most from the ill-effects of climate change.
“Poor people tend to rely heavily on activities, like agriculture, fishing and collecting natural resources, which are sensitive to climate change,” de Guzman said.
“It is also the poor suffering more during disasters. They often live, farm or hold assets in areas more exposed to droughts and floods, which put their homes, crops and livestock at greater risk,” he added.
De Guzman added that CCA and DRR, when mainstreamed in local development plans, offers cost-effective approaches to reduce the negative impacts of natural hazards and extreme weather events on communities.
He said engaging rural people in the adaptation process—especially to understanding autonomous adaptation and the interplay of informal and formal institutions—plays an important role in strengthening public decision-making.
“Farmers and fisher[men] need to have a strong voice in adaptation processes so they can articulate their concerns and priorities, as their views are grounded on their daily lives,” de Guzman said.
According to the latest World Bank Group report, climate change may push more than 100 million people into poverty in the next 15 years.
Farming and fishing communities, the report said, are increasingly vulnerable to heavy rainfall and floods that threaten to decimate their crops and their livelihoods.
The same holds true for the Philippines, which recently experienced its worst El Niño-induced dry spell in 18 years. It is also not so long ago when Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan), one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded, tore through a large portion of the country, killing thousands of people and leaving millions homeless.
The devastation from that typhoon catapulted the Philippines to the top of the list of the 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change, based on the annual Global Climate Risk Index of Germanwatch. The Climate Change Vulnerability Index had also cited the Philippines as the eighth extremely at risk among 32 countries.