The Forest Foundation Philippines has raised before a joint hearing of the House Committees on Sustainable Development Goals and on Climate Change the futility of using concrete and other hard materials as far as flood mitigation in the urban setting is concerned.

This, as Forest Foundation Philippines Deputy Executive Director Alaya de Leon mentioned during the hearing Wednesday, Nov. 4 that the Philippines gained the unenviable distinction of topping the 2025 World Risk Index on vulnerability to flooding.

“We are at the top spot, yet again. We’re always somewhere in the top three, because of our high geographic fragmentation and high exposure to weather related extremes,” De Leon told the joint panel. The index covered 193 countries.

The hearing was held mere hours after Typhoon "Tino" made landfall in Southern Leyte.

During the proceedings, De Leon cited the possible use of nature-based solutions (NBS) to the problem of flooding, but at the same time mindful of the urban situation. She says it's already happening in other Asian countries.

"The Benjakitti Forest Park in Thailand has been presented as one of the best examples, model examples of how to address multiple social and environmental challenges in an urban setting," she said.

"So what the Thai government did is acknowledge that this is—the reality the water will not magically disappear—and building more with hard materials, with concrete is not working," she said.

"So they took up this totally different, totally revolutionary design, and instead thought about what is the challenge, what is the social challenge, societal challenge, it's floods, it’s lack of green spaces, lack of places for biodiversity to thrive, and this is the solution that they employed," she added.

De Leon said that Benjakitti Forest Park was located not in some remote area, but in Central Bangkok. She said it was built on an old tobacco factory.

"The NBS that they employed is a mix, may (there is) blue infrastructure, that they built man-made wetlands, peatlands, swamps, and more."

‘Pag semento siya lahat (If everything is made from concrete) as we've experienced in Metro Manila, there’s really nowhere for the water to go except into homes, into businesses, you know, washing out our bridges, washing out our property," noted De Leon.

She says there's a need "to acknowledge the reality that the water is here and the water will increase because of the increased rainfall brought by climate change".

She said the Thai government's approach was to [champion]... the idea of a sponge city, that a city has to be able to absorb water".

"So that’s why they built it in such a way that it can take the water from rain, from flood kung may rivers dyan na nag-overflow (in case there's a river that will overflow), the city can absorb it like a sponge," she explained.

She said the Thai park was designed to retain up to 200,000 cubic meters of storm water from the surrounding areas during monsoon season--something made possible by the porous landscape and wetlands.