Manila and five other areas have been identified as facing the most severe consequences of climate change, a Time magazine report showed.
“Climate change is expected to affect every country in the world, but its impact will not be felt equally across all regions and some will be worse hit than others because of a range of different threats.
Developing countries, places with widespread poverty, and countries with ineffective governments sometimes face the gravest risks from the changing climate, and are usually poorly equipped to find ways to prepare for and prevent environmental threats,” the report said.
Manila’s dense population, in particular, makes it “more difficult to evacuate, requires more social services and makes it more challenging to rebuild after a disaster.”
“Poor infrastructure, including ineffective drainage and sanitation systems, has been blamed for the toll of floods in the city, including a 2009 flood (Typhoon Ondoy) that submerged 80 percent of the city.”
Aside from Manila, the other areas named in the report are as follows:
• Lagos, Nigeria, which has been marked as at “extreme” risk on Maplecroft’s Climate Change Vulnerability Index;
• Haiti, an island nation that is located in the so-called “Atlantic Hurricane Basin,”
• Yemen, where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed as a result of an ongoing civil war and due to the subsequent famine, poor sanitation, and lack of clean water;
• Kiribati, which is at risk of being wiped off the map entirely in the coming decades amid rising sea levels; and
• United Arab Emirates, which is facing an “extreme risk” of water stress and will need to spend a lot more energy on cooling.
But according to Christina Chan, the director of the World Resources Institute’s climate resilience practice, the Philippines is in fact on the “forefront of climate change adaptation.”
She cited the Flood Management Master Plan for Metro Manila launched in 2012 as well as the creation of a Climate Change Commission.
President Rodrigo Duterte, who lamented that climate change affects the “poorest of the poor” in developing countries such as the Philippines, has been very vocal in questioning international policies on the issue.
“Vulnerabilities are not equally shared by all nations. Developing countries that have contributed the least of global warming, like my country, the Philippines, suffers the most from this horrendous consequences,” he said in his keynote address in May at the 25th International Conference on the Future of Asia held in Tokyo.
“Year in, year out, we suffer double when typhoons strike. The poorest of our poor bear the brunt of damage, becoming even poorer in the aftermath. Government with limited resources and capabilities have to contend with a spiral of suffering on top of the urgent development priorities,” he added.
Despite having a very small carbon footprint, the Philippines, which deals with an average of at least 20 typhoons annually, is among the nations most vulnerable to climate change.
Duterte questioned the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, saying it favored industrialized countries with its aim of slashing greenhouse gases and keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
“What is the system? What is this conference of climate change for? Is it just talk? Because there is no body, no entity to enforce the laws governing climate. There is not even a sanction,” the President said.