The Philippines' recently-submitted Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the 2015 Paris Agreement should have been "more ambitious", Greenpeace Southeast Asia Executive Director Yeb Saño said on Thursday, April 22.
Saño, speaking during the virtual "Pandesal Forum", noted that the country has pledged via the NDC to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent "against our business as usual trajectory".
"In plain terms, that's a 75 percent reduction below what would happen if we did not take all of these measures. So that in itself is a very ambitious number, I would say compared to the the other NDCs...it's relatively ambitious compared to other counties," he noted.
However, when the figure is broken down to its conditional and unconditional components, Saño can see that the Philippines isn't pushing the envelope as much as it should be.
"Where we from the civil service sector see the problem is, out of the 75 percent target that the Philippines is putting forward, only 2.7 percent is unconditional. When you say unconditional, it's like unconditional love. You will do it regardless of what you get," he said.
Saño said the 2.7 percent refers to the amount of action that the country will carry out even without international funding or other support.
"The other 72.3 percent is conditional. Meaning it is premised on receiving support from other countries," he said.
"I think that's an important message that we want to emphasize--countries that are industrialized should support us in our climate action. However, we still think that 2.7 percent unconditional is low and that it's something that is too easy to achieve," said the former Climate Change Commission chief.
"We want to see a submission that could be a bit more ambitious in the context of what we can do on our own," he stressed.
"We're not saying that should be proportionally equal to what we will do with support from other countries, but we think it could be higher and therefore that's the reason why we say it could be a bit more ambitious," Sano explained.
The NDC represents the country’s pledged actions to help achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit the rise of global temperature to 1.5-degree Celsius (maximum of 2.0-degree Celsius) from the pre-industrial era, and in effect prevent global warming.
The Philippines submitted the NDC to the United Nations (UN) last week after missing the original December 31, 2020 deadline.
The 75 percent target on greenhouse gas emissions reduction will be taken from the agriculture, wastes, industry, transport, and energy sectors.
The news forum, organized by Kamuning Bakery owner Wilson Lee Flores, coincided with the celebration of Earth Day.