Our Power, Our Planet: A call to transform climate urgency into collective action

The science is unequivocal: climate change is accelerating, and the Philippines, one of the world’s most at risk countries to climate change, faces escalating threats. But this is not a eulogy for our future. It is a call for urgent action.

Our theme for this year’s International Mother Earth Day, “Our Power, Our Planet,” reflects the solutions embedded in our laws, communities, and enduring bayanihan spirit.

At the Climate Change Commission (CCC), we recognize that sustainability and climate resilience are a vision for the future that we — the national and local governments, our development partners, and our institutions — are all duty-bound to fulfill. The policies we make and the resources we deliver need to be ambitious and transformational, shaped by the principles of climate justice and equity.

The Philippine government has enacted robust frameworks like the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) and Nationally Determined Contribution Implementation Plan (NDCIP), that mandate climate-smart adaptation infrastructure, renewable energy transitions, and climate-resilient communities. Local governments, such as Quezon City’s plastic-free initiatives, translate these policies into tangible progress, while development partners help activate and sustain these programs and interventions through grants.

These efforts are vital, but they are only half the equation.

Front and center in the landscape of climate actors are civil society and the private sector, for whom these policies exist. Communities and localities, the academe, the scientific community, businesses big and small — every Filipino has a stake in our vision of a climate-smart, climate-resilient future.

Our frameworks were designed with the imperative of inclusion — on one hand ensuring that the government’s policy-making processes were informed and driven by citizens; and, equally important, the same framework drawing its transformative power from the people for whom these policies were created. This means that at the heart of climate governance are the people themselves, citizens in nation-building empowered to lead the change on the ground; and, from the ground-up, call for government accountability on the promises it made in these policies and laws.

The development of the NAP and NDCIP is a sterling example of this imperative: communities made their voices heard on the urgency of mangrove protection, scientists modeled typhoon trajectories, youth activists demanded coal phase-outs. Now, we enter an even more important phase as we begin to localize the NAP and NDCIP. We ask citizens to not just be passive recipients but as rights holders that will take the lead in the transformation of their communities and the empowerment of sectoral constituencies as we make adaptation and mitigation happen in their localities.

This is climate governance reimagined, where policies are informed by the people and powered through the people.

The CCC’s mandate is clear, that is to ensure that every Filipino recognizes their role in this covenant. Duty-bearers deliver on their promise to craft policies and provide communities the wherewithal to turn these policies into results. Rights holders provide the vision, the grassroots wisdom, the private- and citizen-led investment solutions, the courage to drive reimagined systems.

We already see this bayanihan in the way local governments allocate budgets for adaptation and mitigation, corporates adjusting their business models for a future driven by a carbon-free economy, development partners funding, among others, nature-based solutions, and sectors such as the youth using digital fluency to spread climate awareness.

This Earth Day, let’s rewrite our role from victims of the crisis to victors of solutions. Every question asked, every peso spent, and every story shared weave together the tapestry of our collective resilience. The time for isolated acts is over; the era of bayanihan for our planet has begun.

We at the CCC do not claim to have all the answers. But we are certain of this: The Filipino people united across islands, generations, and sectors are our greatest asset.

Let us channel this ingenuity toward a future where “climate vulnerability” gives way to “climate victory.”

The fight for Our Power, Our Planet begins not in conference rooms, but in communities. It begins with all of us. Ang ating lakas ay nasa ating pagtutulungan.