The warning came with rain

Seventeen years ago, the warning came with rain and with water rising faster than many families could move.

On 26 September 2009, tropical storm “Ondoy” (Ketsana) dumped extraordinary rainfall over Metro Manila and nearby provinces. Streets became rivers. Homes became islands. Families climbed to rooftops, waited for rescue and watched familiar neighborhoods disappear beneath floodwater.

The disaster did not end there. Days later, typhoon “Pepeng” (Parma) battered Northern Luzon, bringing floods and landslides that compounded the country’s losses. In the years that followed, a succession of powerful storms — including “Sendong,” “Pablo,” “Yolanda,” “Ompong” and “Odette” — would leave their own marks on communities from Mindanao to the Visayas and Luzon.

Each storm had its own geography and its own grief. But together, they told a larger story.

The storms did not create the climate crisis. They exposed what the country could no longer ignore: climate risk could enter a home, close a school, erase a livelihood, displace a family and strain an economy in the same terrible moment.

The warning was followed by a firm decision.

In October 2009, the Climate Change Act created the Climate Change Commission (CCC). The law recognized that climate change could not be confined to one department or reduced to disaster response. It had to shape development itself.

That decision was carried by public servants and legislators who understood the scale of the challenge. Senator Loren Legarda became one of the country’s most persistent champions of climate action in the Senate. In the House, Representative Roilo Golez championed House Bill No. 5982, which passed as RA 9729, while Representative Rufus Rodriguez helped advance the legislative work that gave climate governance a stronger institutional foundation.

Their efforts were part of a broader national movement — one sustained by Congress, local governments, civil society, the private sector, academe and communities that refused to treat climate change as a distant or abstract concern.

Much has changed since then.

Under President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., climate governance has gained renewed momentum. The country completed its first National Adaptation Plan (NAP) and its Nationally Determined Contribution Implementation Plan. Local Climate Change Action Plan submissions have risen to nearly 91 percent. In 2024, the People’s Survival Fund’s initial P1-billion allocation was fully committed for the first time. The Climate Change Expenditure Tagging is providing datasets to analyze more deeply how public funds are being spent for transformative climate action.

These are real gains. They reflect work across government and society. But anniversaries should not become inventories of documents.

Seventeen years later, the harder question is no longer whether or not creating the Commission was the right decision. Emphatically, it is whether we have equipped that decision to work.

We gave the CCC a mandate that reaches across the whole machinery of government: connect science with policy, national plans with local action, public budgets with climate risk, and domestic priorities with international commitments.

Did we also give it the means to carry that weight?

A commission expected to coordinate agencies, support local governments, track climate action and represent the country abroad cannot run on mandate alone. A mandate, after all, is not a resource. We cannot ask one institution to hold the thread across government, then give it too little with which to stitch.

This is not a call for one agency alone. It is an invitation to renew a national compact. Congress must continue to provide the authority and resources that climate governance requires. National agencies must make climate risk part of ordinary planning and budgeting. Local governments must turn plans into protection on the ground. The private sector, academe and civil society must help expand knowledge, innovation, accountability and investment.

The cost of inaction is visible, though no single figure captures it. The NAP estimates that climate inaction could cost P645 billion a year across eight priority sectors in the 2030s.

Yet even that is not the whole bill. The plan acknowledges that health impacts, lost ecosystem services and other social costs are not comprehensively captured. A damaged road is easier to price than a family uprooted, a childhood interrupted by evacuation, or a reef that may not return.

Some losses can be counted. Others are simply carried.

This is why President Marcos’ call for predictive governance matters. A forecast has value only when it changes a decision — where we build, what we fund and whom we protect before a hazard becomes a disaster.

Today, a strong El Niño threatens to intensify into a very strong event. The recent Pacific Pre-COP31 meeting in Fiji raised the same question at the global level: will ambition be matched by means?

Developing countries may need $310 to 365 billion each year for adaptation by 2035. International public adaptation finance, however, reached only $26 billion in 2023.

The lesson is the same from Fiji to the barangay. Plans require institutions. Institutions require people, authority, information and sustained resources. Support cannot rise with disaster and recede with the headlines.

Perhaps the Commission’s 17th anniversary is useful because it asks more than what we have built. It asks whether we have helped it bear the weight we placed upon it.

Hindi sapat ang atas kung kapos ang kakayahang tumupad. (A mandate is not enough if the capacity to fulfill it is lacking.)

The warning came with rain in 2009. It came again in many forms, across many places, in the years that followed. The answer must be broad enough to honor every loss. And strong enough to arrive before the next one.