Resilient by design: Senate voices, national resolve

When I entered the Senate hall last week for the organizational meeting of the Committee on Environment, Natural Resources and Climate Change chaired by Senator Camille Villar with Senator Erwin Tulfo as vice chair, it was clear this was no ordinary gathering. The room was full: senators, national agencies and the broad range of stakeholders present. The atmosphere carried a sense of urgency. Climate change was not being discussed as tomorrow’s problem. It was being recognized, rightly, as the defining context of our present and our future.

I thank Senator Villar and Senator Tulfo for the invitation to present and engage in this discussion. Their leadership provides not only a platform for dialogue but a compass for alignment, so that the work ahead may be shared, coherent and purposeful.

Senator Villar put it plainly: floods are no longer just natural hazards but governance challenges. They expose gaps in how we plan our cities, enforce our laws and prepare our people. Senator Tulfo pointed to irresponsible mining and land grabbing, warning of the toll they take on Indigenous Peoples and communities. Both spoke to truths the science affirms: resilience is inseparable from governance, justice and foresight.

The numbers are stark. Between 2011 and 2021, typhoons cost the Philippines P673 billion. This year’s El Niño wiped out P15 billion in crops. In 2024, “Severe Tropical Storm Kristine” and “Super Typhoon Leon” displaced 9.6 million Filipinos. By 2030, climate projections warn of P83 billion in annual infrastructure losses and P466 billion in productivity losses from extreme heat. But behind each figure are lives: farmers in Mindanao watching their harvests wither, students in Metro Manila wading through floods just to reach school, coastal families in Samar forced to retreat as the sea swallows their land.

For too long, responses have been fragmented — a seawall here, a mangrove project there — important, but often uncoordinated. Without coherence, we end up with patchwork defenses: costly, inefficient and unsustainable. What we need instead is resilient, integrated living infrastructure: systems where natural and human-made defenses reinforce one another. Mangroves, forests, wetlands and bamboo are not ornamental. They are living infrastructure, as vital as bridges or drainage, buffering storms, regulating water and sustaining livelihoods. Combined with well-planned cities, communities and regions, and social protection, they form the foundation of resilience.

This is the vision of the Philippines’ first National Adaptation Plan (NAP), launched under the leadership of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. It is not only a strategy for survival but an investment plan for our people: a science-based framework that uses climate modeling, risk analytics, and futures thinking to guide choices until 2050. Developed with national agencies, local governments, CSOs, the academe, the private sector, and development partners, the NAP shows how resources can be directed where they matter most — protecting lives, sustaining livelihoods and strengthening communities.

Here lies an important point raised by the senators. Success requires drawing on the strengths of all institutions, large and small. Agencies like the Climate Change Commission may not have the scale of line departments, but their role is strategic: cutting across silos, embedding climate foresight into planning, and aligning national and local action. Size belies function. As Senators Villar and Tulfo themselves noted, the CCC must be more involved — not for prominence, but for coherence. And coherence will be decisive.

The Philippines contributes less than half a percent to global emissions, yet we suffer among the world’s greatest losses. This reality should challenge us, not paralyze us. It means every peso invested must serve two purposes: building resilience and accelerating the just transition to a low-carbon economy. Resilience and decarbonization are not parallel tracks but twin rails of sustainable development.

The Senate meeting was not just procedure. It was a reminder that climate change is testing whether we can govern as one country, one team. The challenge is immense, but the opportunity is greater: to turn science into foresight, foresight into policy, and policy into protection. If we meet this challenge with discipline and vision, the Philippines will not only withstand the storms and droughts that confront us. We will emerge stronger — a nation that invests in its people, builds resilient, integrated living infrastructure, and leads by example in a world searching for solutions. That is the charge before us. That is the legacy we must choose to build.