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PHILIPPINES: Guarded Optimism for New Climate Change Law
By Stephen de Tarczynski
MANILA, Nov 10 (IPS) - While pessimism continues to dog the lead-up to next month’s climate change
talks in the Danish capital of Copenhagen, a new Philippine law aimed at
streamlining the country’s efforts to mitigate and adapt to the effects of global
warming has received a guarded welcome by environmental groups here.
Brother Martin Francisco, chairperson of the Sagip (Save) Sierra Madre
Environmental Society Inc., told IPS that the Philippine Congress had made a
positive move in passing the legislation but stressed that this was only the
initial step.
"The law itself is not the complete answer. It’s just the beginning since many
things need to be done, especially the [formulating of the] implementing
rules and regulations that, according to the law, must be enacted by the
[Climate Change] Commission in the span of six months," says Francisco.
Besides establishing the Climate Change Commission (CCC) to set up,
monitor and coordinate action plans to prepare the country for extreme
weather events that bring about floods and landslides, the Philippine Climate
Change Act of 2009 aims to mainstream climate change mitigation into
broader government policy through a National Framework Strategy and
Programme on Climate Change.
The CCC is to be chaired by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who enacted
the law on Oct. 23, just weeks after two devastating tropical storms, ‘Ondoy’
and ‘Pepeng’—known internationally as ‘Ketsana’ and ‘Parma’, respectively—
led to floods and landslides in metro Manila and other areas of the northern
island of Luzon, which killed around one thousand people.
Although Arroyo has not held back in praising the legislation—saying it
"ushers in a new era in the way the Philippines will tackle climate change in
both the short and long terms, for the benefit of Filipinos today and Filipinos
yet unborn," upon enacting the legislation into law—environmentalists say
that the law’s implementation will be the key to its success.
"In our Philippine experience there is this dichotomy between the law in letter
and its implementation," says Francisco, adding that non-governmental
organisations must monitor the Climate Change Act’s implementation closely.
Greenpeace Southeast Asia has also welcomed the new legislation, calling on
the CCC to formulate the Philippines’s mitigation and adaptation measures
"as a matter of urgency," while Joey Papa, president of Filipino environment
protection group ‘Bantay Kalikasan’ (Nature Watch), warned against expecting
too much from the act "without its correct and immediate implementation."
Yeb Saño, head of World Wide Fund for Nature-Philippines’s climate change
and energy programme, believes that the law "is a step in the right direction."
But in order to be successfully implemented, he says that other laws related
to the environment also need to be enforced.
It is "important that the Philippines be serious about enforcing environmental
laws, including laws on forest, laws on fisheries, laws on solid waste, laws
that protect watersheds, otherwise the new law won’t be as effective as it
should be," says Saño, who will be part of the official Philippine delegation—
along with representatives of other NGOs—at the Copenhagen climate
conference in December.
Although the effective implementation of laws is a common concern
regarding many areas of Philippine legislation, the characteristics of the
threat that climate change poses to this nation of nearly 100 million people
has elicited particular unease.
The Philippines is widely regarded as being very susceptible to the effects of
global warming. Sea-level rises, increases in ocean temperatures, and more
frequent and intense tropical storms and typhoons are just some of the
adverse impacts that the Philippines is expected to have to deal with—or is
even dealing with already—as the earth gets hotter.
While such impacts have the potential to be disastrous for the Philippines, the
effects are likely to be magnified if the country does not ready itself to cope.
Speaking at a senate committee hearing on climate change in late October,
Jerry Velasquez, a senior coordinator with the United Nations International
Strategy for Disaster Reduction body, warned that the Philippines must act to
prepare for disasters greater than the recent storms.
"The Philippines is one of the very hotspots for climate change," said
Velasquez. "What happened during Ondoy and Pepeng was not the worst. The
worst is still to come."
In a nation whose booming population already eats more rice than it is able to
grow—the Philippines imports 10 percent of its rice, the staple diet of most
Filipinos, from the likes of Vietnam and Thailand—Saño argues that food
security is the number one issue facing the Philippines when it comes to
climate change.
He says that extreme weather events will damage crops—as the recent
storms did, with rice particularly hard hit—while a change in rainfall patterns
is also already evident.
"Rain has been heavy in areas where you don’t need it [and] has been absent
where rain is badly needed," says Saño.
"This has affected the planting and harvest seasons for famers as well as the
harvest season for fisher folk," he told IPS.
A report by the Asian Development Bank, released in April, warned that if
measures are not taken to mitigate and adapt to climate change, then rice
production in the Philippines could fall by up to 70 percent by 2020.
And while the new law intends to prepare the Philippines for the adverse
effects of a warming planet, it also replaces the structures through which
climate change issues have hitherto been addressed.
It abolishes previously established environmental bodies, including the
Presidential Task Force on Climate Change and the Inter-agency Committee
on Climate Change, whose functions will be incorporated under the CCC
mantle.
As for mainstreaming climate change issues into other areas of government
policy, based on the new legislation, Saño says that such a requirement may
be more difficult to put into practice.
"It’s always easy to say that we are mainstreaming a certain issue into the
mandates of [government] agencies, but it’s another thing to be able to
actually see that into implementation," he says.
(END/2009)
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