President Marcos emphasized how the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) will significantly assist the Philippines in addressing the adverse effects of climate change amid increasing disaster risks.
In his meeting with the members of the Board of the FRLD in a courtesy call in Malacañang, Marcos cited the series of typhoons that hit the country in the past weeks, saying such number of calamities did not happen since the mid-1940s.
“We’re working very hard for the board to be based here in Manila because [of] its supreme importance for the Philippines, because of all of the risks that we are bracing [for], because of climate change,” Marcos said during the meeting on Monday, Dec. 2.
“The momentum since the industrial revolution is something that can’t be easily be moved or stopped or at least redirected. In the meantime, I hope all of you can find solution so that, we in the Philippines, most of our people do not suffer,” he further said.
“That’s how urgent we consider the board’s work and how it is important to us that you work here in Manila, in the Philippines,” he added.
The Board of the FRLD will serve as the principal decision-making body that governs and supervises the Fund. It’s composed of 26 members from the Conference of the Parties (COP) and Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA), with 12 members from developed country parties and 14 members from developing country parties.
The Philippines secured a seat on the Board as permanent representative of the Asia-Pacific Group for 2024 and 2026 and as alternate representative of the Asia-Pacific Group for 2025.
The Fund’s mandate includes a focus on addressing loss and damage to assist developing countries particularly vulnerable climate change’s adverse effects.
Richard Sherman and Jean-Christophe Donnellier co-chair the Loss and Damage Fund board while Ibrahima Cheikh Diong serves as the fund’s executive director.
Due to the Philippines’s location in the Pacific tropical cyclone belt and the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is prone to loss and damage caused by the climate crisis. It has an estimated cumulative economic losses and damage from 2003 to 2022 ranging from a low end of $12.3 billion to a high end of $100.91 billion.
Part of the county’s climate change mitigation and adaptation measures include the submission in May 2024 of its first National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the formulation of its first Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) Implementation Plan.
The plans support the country’s NDC commitment to greenhouse gas emissions reduction and avoidance of 75 percent from 2020 to 2030.
The Philippine government also increased its climate change expenditures by 149.66 percent or from P178.2 billion in 2021 to P444.9 billion in 2022. This year, P457.4 billion was allocated for climate change-related programs, activities, and projects.
It has also mobilized an estimated $590.92 million or P34.13 billion to support the implementation of 54 projects and commitments, covering forestry, land management, biodiversity, environment protection, and climate change.