A 2008 report stated that none of the poverty reduction or health improvement programs in the country had taken into account the impact of climate change. Yet, we are among the countries placed in the Global Climate Risk index because of frequent environmental disasters – earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, with an average of 22 typhoons per year.

I don’t know if it is the special committee appointed by President Arroyo that is responsible for charting the strategy for disaster risk reduction. If it is, we trust that it would reexamine current poverty plans and their implementation. We have to ask hard questions like what catch-up plan do we have to get where we were before the recent disaster. We already lagged behind in at least three targets – primary education, maternal mortality, and health services. The good news is that Global Change, which includes prevention and response to disasters is seen as a collective effort and that therefore we can draw from the MDG and other frameworks prepared by the United Nations Development Fund, the US Country Assistance Program, Asian Development Fund, World Bank, among others. Global Change goes beyond the UN Convention on Climate Change framework to include resource depletion, economic crisis, competition for water, environmental degradation, pollution as part of the accelerating change today. As our Asia-Pacific Friends Committee which dialogues over Skype every fortnight had concluded, after drawing from the UN, ADB, WB, and President Obama’s UN keynote speech on climate change and global security, the changes impact our global economy, business, and society and that the nature of this change is “interconnected and integrated.”

How we are able to balance these changes; how we survive the cataclysm, and how we are in fact, able to flourish is the real challenge. As was shown during the US recession, the world is too interconnected to do it alone, and international cooperation is an imperative. This would require new lifestyles, new core principles and a code of ethics. The latter may have to be suggested as part of the Copenhagen summit agenda.

While the direction is towards global cooperation, here at home, we have to confront pressing issues such as responding to the needs of disaster victims, especially, the poorest of the poor. It is reported that some P32 billion yearly will be needed to come up with the socialized housing for the 500,000 informal settlers in Metro Manila. It will be a test of the capacity of the next administration to come up with creative and innovative approaches in budget and program planning. In the interim, we need to get the public fully involved and thus, we have to communicate the implications of these processes – mitigation, adaptation, innovation. We will need to reexamine our own Medium Term Development Plan to make sure the plans are precise and doable. We have to allocate counterpart resources for the poverty agenda suggested by UNDP (microfinance, indigenous peoples, unleashing entrepreneurship especially among informal settlers; and strengthening institutional mechanisms – civil society, basic sectors, and local governments); the US Country Assistance Program which gives priority to poverty and conflict-reduction especially in Mindanao, governance and rule of law, disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, disaster preparedness, and improved competitiveness. A more localized strategy, the Urban Partnership Program in Western Visayas, with assistance from the Canadian Urban Institute developed a Leadership series on Building Resilient Communities and observed that disaster reduction and preparedness programs are more cost-effective than rescue and relief activities. But the present calamity fund under the Local Government Code merely responds to crisis and is limited to relief and rescue operations, according to.Nereo Lujan who noted that the Fund for rehabilitation is not channeled through local government but disbursed through national government agencies which usually failed to consult the LGUs. As we can see, there is much to do even in the restructuring of existing institutions to make them relevant to present needs. My e-mail is florangel.braid@gmail.com