The tail end of 2024 has brought a slew of storms over the Philippines, along with renewed questions about future efforts in contending with increasing volumes of destructive weather. After the landfall of Typhoon Man-Yi, the latest of six typhoons in the span of a month to batter parts of the country as of November, government agencies and foreign bodies including the UN and the United States alike have sprung into action to deliver aid to residents of affected areas in the north of the main island. With over 150 people dead and nearly 700,000 displaced residents seeking temporary shelter, attention begins to turn to the risk reduction and disaster prevention efforts that are desperately needed to save lives and protect communities.1 Prevention strategies should optimize government resources and external support to deliver the best outcomes for vulnerable communities, while responding to the needs of different localities across the country.
A 2013 study examined how Sorsogon City could serve as a model for building climate resilience in secondary cities. Classified as “Very High Risk” for climate-related disasters by the Manila Observatory and the Department of Environment, Sorsogon faces significant challenges that make it an ideal case study for exploring innovative, community-sensitive strategies.2 Researchers identified four key areas for effective disaster risk reduction: localizing climate change assessment and planning, avoiding oversimplifications in the absence of data, addressing diverse community concerns, and balancing short-term actions with long-term investments. These conclusions emphasize that regionally relevant, community-led strategies guiding disaster risk reduction initiatives succeed in saliently responding to the needs of groups most vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather and climate disasters.
Equally critical to ensuring the development of successful policies are collaborative relationships between civil society, private sector actors, and government organizations. Corrine Cash, an Assistant Professor of Planning and Community Climate Adaptation at Mount Allison University, argues that citizens can initiate tangible change within their communities using individual skills. In her 2021 case study on Sitio Libis, an area in the Canumay East District that mostly houses families in informal settlements, Cash details the processes through which community members launched negotiation and advocacy efforts to improve local protections for climate change-related risks. Having conducted research on the internet to learn about available resources, accumulated savings as a community, and written funding proposals; community members worked determinedly towards securing land tenure and purchasing land to improve their settlement.3 Although spearheaded by a strong community coalition, the change that unfolded in Sitio Libis crucially required support from NGOs, government actors, and the private sector—citizens turned to government-sponsored support systems and programs to fully realize their goals.4 Along with the continued cultivation of massive mobilization and fair leadership within community groups, NGOs and civil organizations must be allocated resources to allow community groups to achieve stronger, more equitable outcomes in climate resilience.
A remarkably different approach to climate resilience is being undertaken by smallholder farmers participating in innovative Field Schools in Mindanao. A southern island of the Philippines, Mindanao also ranks high in most climate vulnerability measures; susceptible to flash floods, earthquakes, landslides, and alternating patterns of drought and heavy rainfall.5 Given that medium and large-scale disasters pose potentially tremendous losses in agricultural production and food supply chains, attention has turned to potential adaptive and mitigative practices in farming. Climate-resiliency Field Schools are an institutional strategy used by local NGOs and governments to strengthen the pedagogical understandings of innovative climate-smart agriculture practices in the fields of adaptation, mitigation, and food production measures to enable farmers to better achieve food and nutrition security in the face of increasing climate risks. The Field Schools typically see diverse crops produced in low-volumes as opposed to farms exclusively producing cash crops and rely largely on organic farming and soil conservation strategies to respond to the impacts of day-to-day weather, ultimately improving access to food.6 The practices undertaken by the Field Schools involve co-producing conventional farming technologies with a “learning by doing” approach, establishing local connections with farmer and NGO groups to harmonize community-level policies, all alongside employing a range of participatory tools to improve awareness and education to help plan climate-resilient livelihood strategies.7
At the end of the day, disaster risk reduction strategies must respond to regional needs in order to prevent and respond effectively to disasters. Although some aspects of locally specific plans are inevitably inapplicable in different cultural, political, and geographic contexts, the significance of striving to achieve more robust and inclusive approaches to climate-resilient planning is not lost on the growing tide of destructive weather patterns across Asia as a whole. The impacts of climate change pose damaging effects to farmers living in fragile environments such as coastal areas, residents of informal settlements such as those of Sitio Libis, and many vulnerable and marginalized groups far from the reach of civil society and governmental frameworks. Local governments, private sector organizations, and nonprofits must offer support for local groups to empower their progress in initiating climate-resilient adaptation and mitigation practices that best suit varying needs across the country. Though each case in the Philippines may highlight unique local values and responses, the implications of each success offer an optimistic outlook for climate resilience across Asia.
Silin Wei is a third-year student pursuing a double major in Peace, Conflict, and Justice Studies & Contemporary Asian Studies along with a minor in Political Science. Her research interests include climate resilience, equitable education reform, and gender in politics, building on her prior work in researching food justice and related patterns of inequity in the Greater Toronto Area. As a Contributor at Synergy, she hopes to explore the approaches taken by Asian states to shifting global power balances and transnational challenges through an interdisciplinary lens.
Footnotes
- Rose Carmelle Lacuata, “From Kristine to Pepito: 6 Cyclones batter PH one after another,”ABS-CBN News, November 14, 2024, https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/2024/11/14/from-kristine-to-pepito-6-cyclones-batter-ph-one-after-another-2209. ↩︎
- Cat Button et al., “Vulnerability and Resilience to Climate Change in Sorsogon City, the Philippines: Learning from an Ordinary City?” Local Environment 18, no. 6 (2013): 707, https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2013.798632.
↩︎ - Corrine Cash, Creating the Conditions for Climate Resilience: A Community-Based Approach in Canumay East, Philippines,” Urban Planning, 6 no. 4 (2021), 305, https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i4.4536. ↩︎
- Cash, “Conditions for Climate Resilience,” 306. ↩︎
- Alvin Chandra et al., “A Study of Climate-Smart Farming Practices and Climate-Resiliency Field Schools in Mindanao, the Philippines,” World Development 98 (2017): 216, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.04.028. ↩︎
- Chandra et al., “Climate-Smart Farming Practices,” 220-221. ↩︎
- Chandra et al., “Climate-Smart Farming Practices,” 215. ↩︎
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