When risk becomes foreseeable

When risk becomes foreseeable | Daily Tribune

Which factors mattered most in the recent floods, and to what degree, requires proper technical assessment? We should be careful not to mistake coincidence for causation, or one visible failure for an explanation of the whole event.

Climate change adds another dimension. Attribution science can help determine how a changing climate may have influenced the likelihood or intensity of particular extreme events. That analysis must be rigorous. Climate change should neither become a convenient explanation for every extreme event and its impacts nor be excluded where the science shows that it matters.

This is why adaptation cannot be reduced to flood-control infrastructure alone.

Engineering remains indispensable. But watersheds and wetlands can slow, store and absorb water. Solid-waste management affects waterways and drainage. Land-use decisions shape exposure. Local planning determines how national risk information translates into decisions about actual places.

The scale of future risk makes these connections increasingly important.

The Philippine National Adaptation Plan 2023 to 2050 projects that between 2.3 million and 4.8 million Filipinos could be exposed annually to pluvial flooding in the 2020 to 2040 period, depending on the emissions scenario. Projected annualized damage to infrastructure could reach around P274 billion.

These are not predictions of inevitable loss. They are estimates of risk. Their value lies precisely in giving us time to change the outcome.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has called for government to move beyond the reactive toward the proactive and predictive. Climate adaptation is one area where that direction acquires practical governance meaning.

Prediction’s particular value is when it changes a decision.

Climate science must inform our understanding of risk. Risk must influence planning. Planning must shape budgets and investments. Implementation must reduce exposure and vulnerability. Actual events, in turn, must tell us whether our assumptions and interventions worked.

The foundations exist. The National Adaptation Plan provides a forward-looking, science-based framework for understanding and managing climate risk. Climate Change Expenditure Tagging helps identify public resources directed toward climate action. The challenge is to connect these instruments more closely to decisions — not simply asking whether an expenditure is climate-related, but whether investments address the right risks, in the right places, and measurably reduce vulnerability.

This is preventive adaptation.

For the Climate Change Commission, this necessarily involves the whole of government. Different institutions hold different parts of the solution — from science and infrastructure to planning, finance and local implementation. Our role is to help connect climate risk across this system, not substitute for these mandates.

There is another lesson hidden in all this water.

Flooding and water insecurity are not contradictions. They are different expressions of the same challenge: not simply how much water we receive, but when and where it falls, how quickly it arrives, and how effectively our natural and built systems absorb, store, convey and use it.

The recent floods should therefore do more than compel us to explain what happened. They should help us decide what happens next.

What did we anticipate? What actually happened? Which systems performed? Where were thresholds exceeded? What reduced losses? What should the next plan, budget or investment do differently?

A plan gives us projections. An actual event gives us evidence. Good governance connects the two.

We will never remove uncertainty from climate risk. Prediction will not tell us precisely where every flood will occur or how different systems will interact.

But uncertainty is different from being unprepared.

The measure of predictive governance is therefore not just whether we predicted the next rain correctly. It is whether what we already knew was clear enough, shared enough and actionable enough to survive the journey into decision-making before it fell, transforming knowledge into impact and risk into readiness.