The climate crisis is a reality, a real-time concern, an undeniable and unignorable problem everywhere, year in and year out.
Most of our cities and urban centers and a wider countryside are now defenseless to and easily destructible by nature’s wrath exacerbated by unabated human-induced disastrous activities like mining and quarry operations, deforestation and frontier clearings, conversion of our lands and resources, almost never-ending construction of substandard roads, bridges, anti-flood control systems, and other infrastructures.
Since Ondoy or even before that, to Yolanda and the recent ones, including this typhoon Carina, our people have been helpless, seeing them always devoured by our now “unfriendly” environment.
Our government despite the valiant and untiring efforts of its agencies and personnel - looks reprehensible and seems guilty even if uncharged, in the face of collapsing and useless infrastructures, reactive and token relief services.
Now is the time to put a decisive stop to the government’s mindset and practice of piece-meal and short-term, budget-oriented and wish-listing, and the crook/SOP-driven national development planning and programming system.
Our crisis demands a strategic reorientation of our national and local planning systems, and such calls for no less than advancing comprehensive and strategic, inclusive (people-oriented & community-based), and need-sensitive, resilient sustainable, and climate crisis-adaptive development planning and programming.
In layman’s terms: institutionalizing a government that can prevent big life casualties and property damages before every disaster strikes, and quickly restore the basic needs after a disaster strikes, especially in terms of water, electricity, food supplies, roads, and bridges passageway.
A government that relies not only on its limited anti-disaster personnel and modern technologies, but on having empowered and disaster capacity-prepared most vulnerable peoples and communities take an active role in preventive and recovery tasks, first in their communities as first responders, and then on the bigger societal scale. The same should go for the privileged and elite families who have big resources but are often unmindful of the conditions around them.
These are easier said than done, but there’s no other way to overcome crisis – develop our resiliency.
To achieve resiliency is to master the science and art of prevention of the socio-economic impact of crisis. This includes re-orientation and re-engineering of the government’s existing urban-rural development planning systems away from the existing neo-liberal policies of giving undue advantage to big corporate interests, multinational corporations, big land developers, in cahoots with the bureaucrat capitalists, technocrats, and politicians.
Instead of prioritizing destructive, expensive and big corporate projects like reclamation, dams, massive land conversions for corporate economic processing zones, plushy subdivisions, one-stop-shop malls, agri-industrial business farms, cyber centers, POGO hubs, and military bases – much should be given to mass-oriented projects like low-cost mass housing, public parks and recreation centers, larger walkable and biking streets, collective farms, among many, that will promote the welfare, security and safety of Filipinos.
This new paradigm also includes giving premium in planning and budgeting in support of building community-based capacity development for climate crisis awareness, local environmental mapping and analytics, disaster risks management, and most importantly, the participatory program for recovery and protection of ecosystems.
Second, is the quick recovery from crisis, which includes community-based preparedness, re-engineering of our water, power/electricity, transport, other service utility and resource systems towards climate adaptive readiness, and systems for mass mobilization of various stakeholders and government agencies and units, everyone with clear tasks to perform, to spread out and speed up the relief and recovery works from crisis.
As a nation sitting in the “ring of fire” and highly vulnerable to typhoons, tsunamis, and other climate crisis impacts, it is a must to raise the awareness and capacity of the people to master the science and art of climate crisis management including mastery of modern technologies on meteorological research and development, and a must for government to rid itself of vested interests and puppetry to foreign control and manipulation, and be at the forefront of the fight for climate justice.
Third, the pursuance of building the foundations of comprehensive resiliency towards sustainability, which include prioritizing the restoration of our ecosystems, land use plans that keep adequate lands and farms for our food security and public uses, improving our climate crisis-adaptive urban structures and designs, re-inventing and innovating our public utility service systems esp. water, power and transportation that can withstand the worst of natural disasters or easily restorable.
The disasters that have struck our nation for decades and have put millions of vulnerable Filipinos in helplessness and misery are proof of the continuing bankruptcy of our government’s neoliberal export-oriented, import-dependent, consumer-led, and debt-driven development paradigm.
It is time to change our current oblivious course to perdition.