A RELATIVELY new form of news reporting is gaining attention following the natural disasters that left widespread damage and displacement in Cebu this year. It’s called resilience reporting and it goes beyond victims surviving and picking up their lives after the devastation.
It is precisely because of the devastation wrought in affected areas that reporting on building resilience becomes crucial, especially in Cebu. The last quarter of 2025 saw a massive earthquake and numerous aftershocks, and a typhoon that caused deadly flash floods in many parts of the province and metropolis.
Resilience reporting is about focusing disaster coverage not on communities bouncing back or the “bayanihan” spirit at play, but on the difficult questions of why damage at this scale happened and who were responsible for failing Cebu.
Journalism organizations such as the Solutions Journalism Network describe this approach as reporting on responses to problems while also examining their effectiveness. Applied to disasters, resilience reporting means looking not only at how people cope, but at whether governments, institutions and private actors did what they were supposed to do before the calamity struck.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, through the Sendai Framework, defines resilience as the capacity of systems and communities to prevent, mitigate and prepare for risks. By that definition, flash floods, the displacement of thousands of people and the familiar scenes of residents cleaning mud from their homes are not signs of resilience but signs that resilience was absent.
If how disasters are reported in the news focuses on survival and recovery to human interest stories, then the difficult questions, the “whys,” may end up being unanswered.
The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma also pointed out that repeatedly praising victims for coping can unintentionally normalize suffering and shift responsibility away from those in power. This practice is called “resilience washing.”
In Cebu, resilience washing should not be an option because there are already information that have come out to help answer questions on accountability. Recent reports by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism documented how Cebu members of the House of Representatives received enormous allocations for infrastructure projects, that may include those for flood control and drainage, under recent national budgets. These are not abstract figures. These are public funds meant precisely to prevent the kind of devastation seen during typhoon Tino on Nov. 4, 2025.
When flash floods still overwhelm communities despite these massive allocations, resilience reporting demands follow-through. Where did the money go? Were the projects appropriate to the risk? Who were the contractors?
Local media have a critical role to play in finding answers to these questions. Newsrooms are best placed to localize the findings so far and keep them in the public eye.
Investing more time and reporting muscle into the causes of disasters does more toward protecting the public than any number of inspirational, human-interest stories after the disaster.