The future will test our promises

Years ago, in Lake Sebu, I met Nanay Rosie Sula, a T’boli woman leader and Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan awardee. She recalled when elders could read the seasons, fish were plentiful, and nature was a gift to be cared for. Then she said: “We began to abuse nature and got more than we needed.” The climate, she told me, was changing.

Nanay Rosie’s message stayed with me. It was not a forecast. It was an account of change felt in a community’s relationship with land, water and livelihood. It asked: When the signs are clear, what will those with the power to decide do?

The United Nations was founded to spare succeeding generations the scourge of war. But peace also depends on safe homes, food and water and livelihoods that endure. Climate change places them all under growing strain.

The warning is now measured in degrees. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says the past three years were the three warmest on record. United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres has put the hard truth plainly: a temporary overshoot above 1.5°C is now inevitable. Our task is to keep that breach as small and short as possible, and bring temperatures back below 1.5°C as quickly as possible. Every fraction of a degree matters, and some harm during overshoot cannot be reversed.

For the Philippines, that warning has an immediate face. WMO expects El Niño to intensify to very strong levels and persist through February 2027. It is a natural climate pattern unfolding across oceans and an atmosphere already warmed by greenhouse gas emissions. It can deepen heat and drought while shifting rain elsewhere — too little water in some places, too much in others.

A nationwide 2024 survey by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, covering 4,608 Filipinos, found that more than 85 percent believe climate change is real. Yet 66 percent had taken no measures to adapt, while only 22 percent viewed government climate efforts positively. High awareness has not consistently become readiness, and public policy has not always become visible protection.

What, then, has changed? And what must still change?

The Philippines has built its climate architecture over time. The National Climate Change Action Plan established priorities for 2011 to 2028. Under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s leadership, the country completed its first National Adaptation Plan for 2023 to 2050, underscored predictive governance, strengthened local climate planning, and expanded adaptation finance through the People’s Survival Fund. These are consequential advances.

Their test is whether climate policies and information do more than confirm what we already fear. They must change decisions, question assumptions behind established practices, and compel us to reconsider where and how we build, farm, invest, manage water and protect health. Prediction has value when it helps government act before risks become losses.

That is the test of the Climate Change Commission, 17 years after its establishment and of the system it was created to coordinate. The Commission must coordinate, monitor and evaluate government climate action and mainstream it across national, sectoral and local development. Departments and local governments must align decisions, budgets and implementation within their mandates. The CCC’s relevance lies in making these responsibilities cohere.

The anniversary should invite neither self-congratulation nor a search for one institution to blame. It should make us examine what the CCC and other agencies have delivered, where we have fallen short, and whether national coordination has the authority, capacity and resources for a mandate growing with every climate risk.

Government cannot complete this work alone. Business must align investment with climate risk; academe must bring knowledge closer to public decisions; civil society and communities must test whether policies work where people live. A whole-of-government mandate requires a whole-of-nation response.

That response must recognize whose knowledge shapes its choices. Indigenous Peoples are rights-holders and leaders whose knowledge and governance are inseparable from ancestral lands and waters. Their participation should influence the plans, investments and safeguards that determine resilience in their communities.

The UN faces a similar test. Its relevance will be measured not by promises remembered on UN Day, but by promises delivered. At COP31 in Antalya, countries must limit overshoot, accelerate adaptation and make finance, technology and capacity support accessible to vulnerable nations. For the Philippines, global cooperation must meet national resolve with the means to implement.

Nanay Rosie’s words were a warning, but also a measure of responsibility. Awareness is not safety. Policy is not yet protection. The future will test our promises by what they changed and whether we changed in time.