Philippines Suffers Typhoon Season Rehash By Francesca

Philippines Suffers Typhoon Season Rehash By Francesca Regalado The capital city of Manila was submerged in heavy floods when Typhoon Fung-wong made landfall on September 18, less than a year after Typhoon Haiyan laid waste to central Philippines, leaving more than 6,000 casualties. Fung-wong clocked in 40,000 evacuees in Manila alone before hitting Taiwan and eastern China, while two preceding storms killed at least 110 people in the space of three months (Bloomberg). Typhoon Haiyan was called “the new normal” by former senator Panfilo Lacson, who heads the newlycreated Office of the Presidential Assistant for Rehabilitation and Recovery (OPARR). “We have to build places that can stand up to that sort of weather (CNN),” Sec. Lacson said. According to the Manila Bulletin, the Philippines received nearly $17M in cash donations, the bulk of which was foreign aid from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, and Australia. The Commission on Audit reported in September that the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has yet to utilize said funds for emergency relief operations. DSWD responded that the audit was conducted while dispersion was still underway, but Secretary Corazon Soliman admitted that “there were instances of spoilage” of 128,000 undelivered canned goods. DSWD transferred its mandate of humanitarian response to OPARR in July. OPARR released a plan for rehabilitation in August, nine months after the onslaught. $3.9B will be spent on the rehousing and livelihood training of displaced families, as well as the construction of stormproof evacuation centers (Reuters). When summoned by the Senate oversight committee in December, Mayor Alfred Romualdez of Tacloban, the city most devastated by Haiyan, called out the national government for failing to send immediate reinforcements and for crippling his local government unit with ambiguous bureaucratic processes (Philippine Daily Inquirer). Government relief spending was further slowed by increased caution in the signing of contracts after the abolition of the congressional pork barrel earlier this year. The Budget Department created the People’s Survival Fund in November, making $11.2M available for local government units that conform to the National Climate Change Action Plan (NCCAP). The Climate Change Commission said, however, that the sources for the fund are yet to be identified. Vice President Jejomar Binay implored LGUs to “take advantage of this opportunity” to make coastal communities less vulnerable to nature (Rappler). According to Bloomberg, the Philippines and Japan are at the highest risk from tropical storms originating in the Pacific Ocean, with the former suffering an annual average of 20 cyclones. In an interview with the Envoy, Philippine Deputy Consul-General Zaldy Patron said, “We have become more conscious about climate change since Haiyan. It was a wake-up call.” There was a strong Filipino showing at the People’s Climate March on September 21. Activists appealed to President Benigno Aquino III to change his policy on coal energy, from which the Philippines derives 34 percent of its power generation (Rappler). President Aquino addressed the UN Climate Summit on September 23, saying that “the time of debate [on] whether climate change is real or not is over,” and that “Filipinos bear a disproportional amount of the burden when it comes to climate change (Inquirer).”