Bad executioners

“The World Bank released a study that said we are good at policies, we are good at laws, but we fail to implement them,” a frustrated Lagmay told a news outfit last week.

Weary Lagmay, executive director of the University of the Philippines Resilience Institute and the UP NOAH Center, should know.

In fact, Lagmay and a relatively young cohort of Filipino disaster scientists have been given substantial government funds to build and fine-tune science-based systems for flood management, disaster risk reduction and climate resilience.

Or, in understandable, pedestrian terms during this flooding season, science-based systems that tell us exactly in real time where and where not to build so we’ll better survive increasingly climate change-induced floods.

Such fine-tunings, if Lagmay’s and Project Noah’s work can be called that, means the project is operating within policy and legal vacuums.

In fact, Lagmay says the country serves as a role model for other countries in the region with its adoption of measures to address climate change and disasters, such as the Climate Change Act, the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act and the Climate Change Commission.

“All of these are actually very advanced in the region. Some countries are copying what we have written as laws, but there’s a failure to implement some of what is written in these laws,” Lagmay said.

In fact, failing to execute what’s already enacted was again embarrassingly highlighted last week when the Palace openly castigated government’s time-serving bureaucrats for shelving life-saving recommendations of the Climate Change Commission.

In emphasizing that Mr. Marcos Jr. wanted existing climate change policies and laws immediately enforced, Palace Press Officer Claire Castro said in Filipino, “This is not like a science subject that we’re only talking about now since (the floods) are here. It’s the reality.”

Malacañang has yet to name the government agencies ignoring climate change policies or their negligent chiefs. But the Palace promised disciplinary measures against them.

In reprimanding the bureaucrats, the Palace also didn’t spare insensitive front-line elected officials, especially local officials who are expected to grapple with great bouts of rain during supercharged storms or crop-killing dry spells should the forecasted “super El Niño” finally hit.

Flood-weary citizens had tons of excoriating things to say about insensitive local officials in expensive Pierre Balmain jogging suits and other luxury lifestyle brands going around inspecting the flood devastation in Pampanga. And, in another instance of insensitivity, a mayor in full glam cheekily distributing relief goods to distressed flooding evacuees.

With these grubby surreal images of impervious disaster-risk implementors going rogue, one can only shake one’s head in abject disbelief and grief.

And, the grief doesn’t even include the ceaseless horrors over the unresolved massive corruption, official or unofficial, attending scores of wrecked flood control projects.

At any rate, in sum, the pressing issue right now isn’t that the country lacks overall disaster plans or laws as some are bruiting about.

Instead, the whole country is collapsing under the cumbersome weight of indifferent, callous men and women not doing their jobs.