Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, who also chairs the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, has pledged full support for the creation of the Department of Disaster Resilience.
In a statement, Lorenzana also expressed his appreciation and gratitude to the House of Representatives for promptly acting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s call during his July 23 State of the Nation Address for the creation of the agency.
Immediately after assuming the House leadership, Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered the chamber’s committees on Government Reorganization, and Defense and Security to work on the pending measure.
The two committees unanimously approved the draft DDR proposal which the Appropriations committee subsequently took over for its budgetary requirement. The bill now awaits House plenary deliberations.
In the DND statement, Lorenzana also thanked the DDR bill principal author, Albay Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda and his co-authors, and the chairmen of the House committees on Government Reorganization, Defense and Security, and Appropriations—Reps. Xavier Jesus D. Romualdo, Amado Espino, and Carlo Cua, respectively—for prioritizing the measure.
Taking cognizance of the Philippines’ regular experiences with both natural and human-induced disaster, and the initiatives the country has taken to protect and preserve life and property, Lorenzana said he believed the DDR creation would be another monumental step in the government’s efforts to build safer and more adaptive and resilient Filipino communities.
Salceda said President Rodrigo Duterte’s urgent and repeated calls in his 2017 and 2018 Sonas for an effective disaster management agency to address the impacts of calamities had helped push the DDR bill in Congress.
He authored the original DDR bill (HB 6075), to which 34 other proposals were integrated.
The DDR bill’s journey, Salceda said, “actually began with the sunset review of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2010 mandated by the RA 10121, from 2015 until 2016, which became the basis for the initial draft.”
Salceda said the DDR as conceptualized, fulfills President Duterte’s directive for a “truly empowered department characterized by unity of command, science-based approach and full-time focus on natural hazards and disasters . . . with a ‘Whole-of-Government and Whole-of-Nation’ approach to disaster risk reduction; preparedness and response; with better recovery and faster rehabilitation.”
The DDR will oversee and coordinate the planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of disaster and climate resilience programs, projects and activities; and provide leadership in the continuous development of strategic and systematic approaches to disaster prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery, and rehabilitation, he said in the statement.