Photo shows flooded areas in Naga City, Camarines Sur due to Severe Tropical Storm "Kristine" during an aerial survey conducted by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on Oct. 28, 2024. (Photo: AFP)

Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep. LRay Villafuerte is hoping that as the first host-country of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) Board, the Philippines can secure bigger funds for climate finance at the ongoing meeting here of this new apparatus of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
 
“The ongoing meeting of the FRLD Board in the Philippines, which was selected as the inaugural country-host of this UNFCCC-created panel, presents a splendid opportunity for our country to lobby for greater international financial support for climate mitigation and adaptation,” Villafuerte said on Tuesday, Dec. 3.
 
The fourth meeting of the FRLD Board started on Monday, Dec. 2 at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) in Pasay City, and will run until Friday, Dec. 5.
 
On the opening day of the FRLD Board meeting, Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Ma. Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga cited the need for “vibrant, strong and inclusive” multilateralism or unified international action to deal with the unique challenges faced by climate-vulnerable countries such as the Philippines.
 
Yulo-Loyzaga described the Philippines as a “living laboratory for current and future risks” and a “test case” or “a baseline, not only of what climate-vulnerable developing countries will endure in these uncertain and unpredictable times, but also of our capacity to recover, given adequate and timely access to the right resources".
 
Villafuerte earlier backed the position of President Marcos, as revealed by Yulo-Loyzaga, that the Philippines should use the recent streak of tropical cyclones that hit the country in less than a month—from severe tropical storm Kristine to super typhoon Pepito over the October-November period—as a “test case” for our country in seeking for climate finance funds as a form of climate justice for loss and damage caused by erratic weather patterns.
 
Earlier, Villafuerte had proposed at the start of COP29 that the Philippines use Kristine as “Exhibit A” in seeking climate finance funds from overseas in the UNFCCC’s annual summit and in the then-upcoming FRLD Board in the Philippines.
 
COP29 refers to the 29th annual summit of the UNFCCC or Conference of Parties (COP) on the climate crisis that was held on Nov. 11-22 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and where a deal was struck on increasing the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) or climate finance target to $300 billion, or barely a fourth of the $1.3 trillion in annual financing that high-risk developing economies, including the Philippines, had originally asked for in Baku.  
 
Villafuerte had served a three-term governor of Camarines Sur, which was hardest hit by Kristine that dumped two months-worth of rainfall in a single day on Oct. 24—or almost double than that unleashed by typhoon Ondoy in 2009. The result was roof-level floods in many communities across the province.
 
“It behooves our government to work at the FRLD Board meeting on securing funds from overseas to strengthen the resiliency of our people and their communities against the increasingly calamitous impacts of planet overheating," the veteran congressman said. 

"This is because developing economies including the Philippines managed to secure barely a fourth of the $1.3 trillion in annual NCQG for climate funds that they sought from the world’s wealthiest economies that are also its worst polluters in the recently-concluded COP29 in Baku,” he noted.
 
Worse, Villafuerte said, although the new climate finance goal is actually triple the original NCQG that was set in COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark  in 2009 for mobilizing $100 billion by 2020, the rich UNFCCC member-states only committed to come up with this bigger amount not now or next year, but by 2035.
 
“Our country has the moral high ground to seek much larger funds for climate finance because the far-worse-than-expected devastation wrought, for instance, by Kristine on Bicol is Exhibit A to illustrate that the effects of global warming  on high-risk countries, resulting from  the GHG (greenhouse gas) pollution by affluent economies, are becoming nastier by the day—and thus behooves  these heavy polluters to cough up a lot more money for climate finance,” he explained. 
 
Moreover, Villafuerte said: “The Philippines is in the best position to lead such a lobby for climate justice and finance as our country was selected as the first host-country of the FRLD Board in last year’s COP28 in the Expo City of Dubai in the  United Arab Emirates (UAE), and is now hosting its fourth board meeting at the PICC.”  
 
This FRLD is a loss and damage mechanism set up at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022 and operationalized the following year at COP28.