Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Ma. Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga on Thursday, October. 17, called on local governments to prioritize climate and disaster risk assessments, emphasizing that addressing specific local vulnerabilities is essential for effective future planning and risk management.
“The first thing that local governments will really need to do is to undertake a serious climate and disaster risk assessment to embrace a comprehensive risk management approach which also is part of the work that is being done globally at this point,” she said during a press conference of the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (APMCDRR) in Pasay City.
“Comprehensive risk management really will require not just the natural hazards that they will be exposed to but also the different social, cultural, and physical challenges that they face in terms of their own exposure and vulnerability. Serious work needs to be put into climate and disaster risk assessments at the local level. That will then be the basis for all the planning that they will need moving forward,” she went on.
Local governments, she said, should craft a strategy to engage stakeholders that will be critical to implementing what would be the recommendations out of that assessment and those strategies will enable them to either succeed or not succeed.
“So stakeholder engagement particularly with academia, with the CSO community, with the private sector who will have the resources that they might not have in to address the gaps in the financing because of our fiscal space,” said Loyzaga.
“Those would be the critical steps that would be needed and the President has already taken recognition of these, I should say.”
Plan based on plausible, not possible
According to the DENR chief, the government’s planning work needs to be based “not on the possible which would be the possible given historical examples but on the plausible what might happen in fact because of the uncertainty that we face because of climate change.”
“So [the] DOST (Department of Science and Technology) will be the main source of the hard information for us to move forward,” Loyzaga said.
She highlighted the shift of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to anticipatory action.
“Their shift to anticipatory action I think would be the most critical in terms of disaster prevention,” the DENR secretary said.
“Typically in the response and in the disaster risk reduction management pillars, the DSWD is head of response. But right now strategically they are positioning themselves to anticipate and take early action,” she added.
Per Loyzaga, the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) is “supremely conscious at this point of what investments might be needed in order for us to be sectorally quite climate risk averse.”
“And then of course DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways) because of the reconstruction recovery,” she added.
The DENR chief said the government is currently taking steps to integrate flood management.
“So the multipurpose, the shift towards multipurpose investments in resilient infrastructure specifically in the different sectors I think are what will make us better prepared for the impacts of La Niña,” said Loyzaga.
Lack of financial resources
Kamal Kishore, the special representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, and head of UNDRR, said lack of financial resources of local governments is an “across the board” problem.
“I think there's a long way to go. Lack of financial resources. Lack of financial resources at the local government level. I think this is a problem which is across the board,” he stated.
The lack of financial resources, he said, is not just a problem in developing countries, but also a problem in developed countries.
“Especially cities, the second other cities, who were hit quite hard by the COVID. For example, cities in areas which rely on tourism had no tourists, hence very less revenue, but you still have to pay the salaries of the local government staff,” he said.
“So a large proportion of their revenues are going to salaries. So this is a real challenge.”
Kishore said local governments should identify more innovative ways of generating finance.
In the Philippines, Loyzaga said there is a limited fiscal space, meaning “the government cannot do this alone.”
“And therefore, there needs to be really a shift in the way we would like to address our risks here, which I should say have a potential to cascade throughout the region as well,” she said.
She said the approach towards alignment of resources and accessing resources needs to be more proactive.
“In terms of the way we look at our international financing that we've been able to access, the way we are managing the lean resources that we have, and therefore the need for better science in order to prioritize where these resources should go,” she said.
The Philippines is situated in both the Pacific Ring of Fire and the Typhoon Belt due to its unique geography.