[In This Economy] Kristine’s wake-up call
As I write this, the wind is howling and the trees are swaying near my place.
Severe Tropical Storm Kristine (international Trami) is making its way across Luzon. Unnervingly, Kristine is just about as large as Luzon itself. Metro Manila was placed under Signal No. 2, but the impact here is nothing compared to the damage Kristine wrought in the Bicol Region, as well as in Southern Tagalog.
The floods in Bicol have been insane. Kristine dumped an amount of rain that surpassed the rain Ondoy brought to Manila back in 2009. That’s saying something.
Naga City in Albay was hit particularly hard, and the local government was crying out for help, not because they were unprepared, but because they did not expect the damage to be that bad. One friend and colleague living in Bicol got scared because one of her cousins could not be rescued; eventually, and luckily, that cousin survived and was rescued.
In Batangas, meanwhile, just immediately south of Manila, streets have also been turned into rivers. The actual rivers looked like churning oceans. Town centers were submerged in brown waters and littered with wood debris and cars floating in the floods. The pictures that emerged are not so different from what you’d expect from a town hit by a tsunami — except it wasn’t a tsunami.
The thing is, Kristine isn’t even a typhoon but a severe tropical storm. Things could’ve easily been worse. At any rate, storms like Kristine seem to be increasingly devastating, year after year.
People can’t help but compare how local leaders have responded. Miguel Villafuerte, representative of the 5th district of Camarines Sur, was spotted riding a surfboard, handing out cash to flood victims, sporting Onitsuka shoes. One netizen quipped about the shoes, “Paarbor naman!” (Let me have it!) By contrast, Leni Robredo, former vice president, waded deep in flood waters to help give out relief goods to flood victims.
Meanwhile, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. gave a not-so-inspiring message. On October 23, he said, “Wala tayong magagawa (There’s nothing we can do)…I’m feeling a little helpless here because…all we can do is sit tight, wait, hope, pray that there’s not too much damage, that there are no casualties.”
That’s not at all what you’d expect from the leader of a country that is known to be regularly beaten by typhoons, and the country adjudged to be the most prone to the worst effects of climate change. Disaster preparedness is key, and once more the President is as prepared as a headless chicken.
His being ill-prepared is all the more glaring since, just earlier this month, Marcos hosted a regional conference on disaster risk reduction. He said to delegates, “We must significantly increase our investments and develop financing mechanisms in disaster risk reduction. Sustained and predictable data and financing would help address disaster risks better.” Talk is cheap and action is wanting, as always.
In the same conference, world leaders discussed the Loss and Damage Fund, a pool of money that was agreed upon by the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference held in Cairo. The Philippines was recently chosen to host this Fund, and the World Bank is supposed to operationalize it in the interim.
The Loss and Damage Fund is meant to cover the estimated $400 billion in climate change-related damages faced by countries every year. Disappointingly, of that amount, rich countries have pledged to contribute (as of end-2023) only $700 million. That’s not even 0.2% of the total amount needed per year. And concerningly, the worldwide losses and damage are expected to balloon to at least $1.7 billion per year by 2050.
Pooling resources in this manner is going to be inherently challenging. It’s a classic case of what economists call a “collective action problem”: the world will be better off with this pool of money, but countries will want to free ride and avoid paying up as much as they can, because the benefits are distributed among many countries.
This is why it’s important for the Philippines to take steps and not rely so much on the voluntary kindness of other countries. The Marcos government ought to be paying more attention to disaster risk reduction and management, but efforts are clearly not enough.
Shortly after taking office in 2022, Marcos said he backed the idea of creating a Department of Disaster Resilience. But till now, nothing has come out of that plan.
In May, the Philippines submitted its National Adaptation Plan to the United Nations; we’re the third ASEAN country to do so. But the problem with the Philippines is not so much a shortage of good plans, but a shortage of good institutions to implement those plans.
In his July 2024 State of the Nation Address, Marcos boasted of 5,000 flood control projects. But weeks after, typhoons Carina and Enteng brought massive floods, and the flood control projects were not felt by many.
Responding to disasters requires a whole-of-government approach. But funds for disasters are not so big. Next year, Congress is proposing that the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (NDRRM) Fund should be P31 billion. That’s a P10.5 billion increase from this year.
But according to Zy-za Suzara, my budget analyst friend, we were supposed to have already had P31 billion for NDRRM this year. But for no good reason, Congress slashed the proposed budget from P31 billion to P20.5 billion.
The NDRRM budget also pales in comparison with other budget items, such as pensions and gratuity funds (including the colossal obligations to military and uniformed personnel), which are almost 7.5 times the NDRRM budget this year. Meanwhile, the seed fund for the Maharlika Investment Fund, Marcos’ pet project, is P125 billion or 4 times the proposed DRRM budget next year.
One can just hope that Kristine and the many other devastating typhoons that will cross the Philippines in the future serve as wake-up calls for the government to take much more action than they’re doing right now. – Rappler.com
JC Punongbayan, PhD is an assistant professor at the UP School of Economics and the author of False Nostalgia: The Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk Them. In 2024, he received The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award for economics. Follow him on Instagram (@jcpunongbayan) and Usapang Econ Podcast.