Asia-Pacific, Climate Change, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines

PHILIPPINES: Guarded Optimism for New Climate Change Law

Stephen de Tarczynski

MANILA, Nov 9 2009 (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.