RP climate change preparedness cited

MANILA, Philippines – Prof. Hartmut Grabl, a world renowned scientist on climate change has praised the Philippines for its multi-sectoral efforts in preparing the country to adapt to the effects of climate change, saying that the Philippines was more advanced in its preparations than many developed countries. He also commended the Philippines’ multi-sectoral approach in meeting the challenges of climate change.

Prof. Grabl, who in 1986 was among the first scientists in the world to raise the alarm on global warming, spoke at a policy roundtable co-convened by Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Lito Atienza and Secretary Heherson Alvarez, presidential adviser on climate change.

The policy roundtable was organized to jumpstart the development of a coherent and comprehensive climate change adaptation strategy for the Philippines.

Top level officials from the executive and legislative branches of government and representatives from civil society, academe and foreign funding agencies reiterated their commitment to work together to help the Philippines adapt to climate change.

“We know we will succeed but we need everybody’s help. Otherwise, climate change might just overtake us,” said Atienza in his keynote address during the policy roundtable.

For her part, Sen. Loren Legarda said “Climate change is beyond politics, it is survival.”

Alvarez said that the extreme vulnerabilities of the Philippines being an archipelagic country demands from all sectors the discipline, self-sacrifice and the capacity to deploy scarce resources to confront the challenges of global warming and climate change.

Representatives from the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Health, Science and Technology, Interior and Local Government, Public Works and Highways, National Defense, and NEDA, and the Leagues of Cities, Municipalities, and Provinces and NGOs and academe gave policy statements in support of the development of a national climate adaptation strategy.

The roundtable dialogue was organized by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) with support from the project “Adaptation to Climate Change and Conservation of the Biodiversity in the Philippines (ACCBio)” which is assisted by German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and funded by the German government through the International Climate Protection Initiative of its Federal Ministry for Environment (BMU).

ACCBio has among other projects, funded the construction of a visitor center at the bird sanctuary in Candaba, Pampanga, the training of DENR personnel in surveying caves, the deployment of patrol boats to enforce environmental laws in Lake Naujan in Mindoro Oriental and Negros Occidental, and the enforcement of biodiversity in Verde Island.

These projects come at a time when extraordinary changes in weather patterns are bringing home the point to most Filipinos that climate change is real. The Philippines has been identified as a country that is extremely susceptible to climate change. It faces a high risk of natural disasters: typhoons, drought caused by El Niño, rainfall and temperature increase. Some 70 percent of its 1,500 municipalities are along the coast and face flooding with sea level rise.

Poor Filipinos are particularly vulnerable since many of them have livelihoods that depend on the farmlands, forests, watersheds and seas that will be most affected by climate change.