The Philippines has built one of the most formally developed systems for integrating disaster and climate risks into land-use planning among developing countries, but weak enforcement, uneven local government capacity, as well as political interference continue to undermine its implementation, according to the World Bank.

In two reports dated May 26 and published last Friday, Aug. 28, the Washington-based multilateral lender described the country’s approach as “policy-rich but implementation-poor,” reflecting the persistent gap between its extensive planning framework and implementation on the ground.

The World Bank said smaller municipalities—which often face greater exposure to natural hazards but have fewer resources—struggle to meet even the basic requirements of a compliant climate and disaster risk assessment (CDRA), while highly urbanized as well as better-resourced local government units (LGUs) benefit more from the system’s strengths.

The findings were contained in “Building Resilience into the Blueprint: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why? Insights from Asia-Pacific Countries on Risk-Informed Spatial Planning” and its accompanying country case studies, which examined the Philippines alongside Australia, China, as well as South Korea.

According to the World Bank, the Philippines has established one of the most legally comprehensive risk-informed spatial planning frameworks in Asia-Pacific. Its system requires disaster and climate risks to be incorporated into comprehensive land use plans (CLUPs), which serve as LGUs’ primary instruments for regulating land use.

CDRA, meanwhile, incorporates hazard, exposure, and vulnerability indicators to produce risk maps that are fed into CLUPs and zoning ordinances, as well as comprehensive development plans (CDPs), local disaster risk reduction and management plans (LDRRMPs), as well as local climate change action plans (LCCAPs).

Despite this framework, the World Bank identified enforcement as the system’s “most critical weakness,” citing that zoning ordinances and risk-informed plans are applied inconsistently, particularly in resource-constrained LGUs that lack technical personnel, financing, or political will to enforce controls against powerful development interests.

The report also warned that political pressures and institutional inertia continue to allow development in high-risk areas, while informal settlements in hazard-prone locations largely bypass the formal permitting system, leaving many vulnerable communities outside the protection intended by land-use regulations.

Another structural problem is the proliferation of planning requirements. The World Bank cited that LGUs are required to produce more than 30 mandated sectoral plans with different formats, schedules, and institutional owners, contributing to “planning fatigue” that can weaken the quality of individual plans.

It added that the absence of a National Land Use Act (NaLUA), which the report noted has stalled in Congress for more than three decades, continues to deprive the Philippines of a unified legislative foundation for spatial planning.

Without a NaLUA, the integration of disaster risk into spatial planning remains dependent in part on agency guidelines and executive issuances that are “inherently more fragile than law,” the World Bank said.

The report also raised concern over what it called a growing “science-policy time lag,” noting that many existing CLUPs as well as CDRA guidelines remain based on the United Nations’ (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fourth assessment report (AR4) climate scenarios, even as newer AR5 and AR6 projections have become available.

The newer projections, including more granular regional data as well as updated estimates for extreme events, have yet to be systematically integrated into standard planning guidance and training, raising the risk that existing plans could underestimate future exposure to sea-level rise, heavier rainfall, and stronger storm surges.

Many LGUs also lack tenured geographic information system (GIS) specialists, risk assessment analysts, as well as qualified urban planners, making them dependent on private consultants and limiting their ability to build permanent in-house expertise, the report said.

High personnel turnover following local elections also regularly erodes institutional memory and disrupts continuity between planning cycles, while efforts to professionalize local planning through licensure, civil service reforms, as well as protected technical positions have progressed slowly.

The World Bank likewise flagged the discretionary authority of local zoning boards to grant exceptions and variances from risk-based zoning rules, saying that this creates a pathway for scientific risk assessments to be overridden by political or economic pressure.

The problem is particularly pronounced in rapidly developing peri-urban areas, or those in the outskirts of cities, where rising land values can put landowner and developer interests in conflict with restrictions intended to limit construction in high-risk locations.

The World Bank said legally enforceable risk controls are essential because hazard information treated merely as advisory can be disregarded amid pressure to allow development. It recommended stronger national legislation, formal coordination between disaster-risk and planning agencies, improved local technical capacity, as well as mechanisms to insulate technical land-use decisions from short-term political pressure.

For highly decentralized systems like the Philippines, the report said sustained technical assistance (TA), standardized tools, as well as meaningful national oversight are particularly important to prevent wide variations in plan quality and merely superficial compliance with national requirements.

The World Bank credited the Philippines with having one of the most formally developed disaster- and climate-risk planning systems in the developing world, supported by CDRA and digital platforms such as PlanSmart for sustainable human settlements, geospatial information management and analysis project for hazards and risk assessment in the Philippines (GeoRiskPH), University of the Philippines nationwide operational assessment of hazards (UP-NOAH), and rapid earthquake damage assessment system (REDAS).

It cited the cities of Davao, Iloilo, and Tagbilaran as examples where local political commitment and technical capacity have translated risk-informed planning into flood-protection infrastructure, publicly accessible hazard-overlay zoning maps, as well as building permit systems that provide site-specific risk guidance.

The report also noted that the mandatory five-percent local disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) budget allocation, which, when linked to an approved LDRRMP, provides a structural fiscal commitment for risk-reduction measures.