As the costs of climate disasters mount, activists and governments have been demanding climate justice – including holding rich countries accountable for their historical carbon emissions and securing climate funds for the vulnerable Global South.

But climate injustices persist within countries, too: poor communities often bear the worst impacts of the climate crisis, while the elites contribute disproportionately to it.

The Philippines is among the top 10 most affected countries by extreme weather events in the last 30 years, according to the 2025 Climate Risk Index.

These threats have been exacerbated by corruption among the country’s political rulers and socioeconomic elites.

Earlier this year, a massive scandal erupted that saw billionaire contractors, lawmakers and public officials accused of siphoning off around USD 111 billion from government flood control projects. 

Many of these projects have been substandard, unfinished or even nonexistent – with over 400 ‘ghost’ projects out of a total of around 8,000.

These billions were instead spent on the extravagant lifestyles of the super-rich and their children, while ordinary Filipinos continued to suffer.

The Philippines, like many other countries in the Global South, is trapped in a cycle of disasters and environmental collapse stemming from the climate crisis and amplified by poor governance.

As a result, the most marginalized ultimately pay the highest – and often fatal – price for the climate crisis.

Time and again, nature-based solutions have emerged as clear, cost-effective answers to climate resilience, but they require strong political will and integrity to implement.

Can climate ‘safe zones’ protect Philippine cities?

Flooding has long plagued the Philippines, especially its urban areas, for many complex reasons. Now, the climate crisis is compounding the problem.

The country lies in the so-called typhoon belt – an area of the western Pacific Ocean where tropical storms occur regularly – and endures around 20 storms a year. 

Every time a typhoon hits the Philippines, urban flooding is almost inevitable – and it almost always results in casualties. 

In 2013, the country was hit by Typhoon Haiyan, its most devastating typhoon ever, which claimed more than 6,000 lives and inflicted nearly USD 6 billion in damage.

While substantial funds have been allocated to flood mitigation projects, many cities remain defenseless against these disasters.

There are multiple reasons for this vulnerability, according to Paulo Alcazaren, a renowned Filipino landscape architect and environmental planner.

“It’s a confluence of factors,” says Alcazaren. “Deforestation, climate change, as well as urban expansion, and the ineptitude of public works in building and maintaining the hard infrastructure that’s supposed to mitigate all of this.”

The Philippines has 18 major river basins, which play a crucial role in supplying the country’s towns and cities with water. 

However, upland areas have suffered significant damage from deforestation, land conversion and unsustainable farming practices. 

Alcazaren says it’s imperative that settlements be built in ‘safe zones’ sheltered from the effects of the climate crisis, such as more destructive storms and floods and rising sea levels, as well as other catastrophes like earthquakes.

In doing so, he argues that anthropogenic interventions – that is, the transformation of land and natural systems, such as through the construction of roads, highways and buildings – must be done in ways that work with nature rather than against it.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened.

“We thought that we could get away with just building everything where we want, according to the neoliberalist agendas of businesses and corporate goals, with the government taking a back seat,” says Alcazaren.

Legal trouble

Land ownership also poses legal challenges to establishing safe zones in the Philippines. Private property rights are extremely strong, making it difficult for the government to acquire or use private land for public safety.

The government does have a legal power called eminent domain, enabling it to expropriate land in the public interest, provided it pays the owner a fair market value for it.

However, Alcazaren laments the difficulty of consolidating land or obtaining easements to use land next to rivers or other danger spots to create buffers or safety zones.

The current Philippine Water Code stipulates that safety zones only need to measure three meters in cities and 20 meters in rural areas. However, these are often completely insufficient as rivers can overflow by much greater margins.  

The country’s rapid population growth also compounds the complex issue of flooding.

In 1920, the Philippines had a population of 10.3 million, and arbitrary boundaries were enough to protect most settlements from flooding. 

But that solution no longer works for today’s roughly 117 million Filipinos. Alcarazen says the most effective approach now is to turn to the natural frameworks of the country’s river basins.

“[We] need a radical change of governance structure that should take into account the ridge-to-reef, river basin reality, rather than the political frameworks that have guided us up to now,” he says.

“Unless we change our government structure [and] our mindset, we will die – and people don’t like to hear that. The reality is: [we] have been dying from all of the ineptitude that we’ve seen in the last few decades.”

Gray versus green infrastructure

Today, the Philippines relies heavily on concrete or ‘gray’ infrastructure, such as revetments and levees that restrict water flow into floodplains before it reaches cities downstream.

These concrete structures can aggravate the issue of urban flooding, which is why Alcazaren and other experts have called for a moratorium on them.

But tearing these structures down might not be the answer, either.

That’s because they contain a lot of embodied energy – in other words, the energy used to build them. When they’re demolished, that energy dissipates, and more energy must be sourced to build new structures to replace them.

One alternative is to focus on nature-based solutions (NBS), which have been around since time immemorial and are deeply rooted in traditional practices in many parts of the world, including the Philippines.

“[This] is how our Indigenous people dealt with their situations, because they knew they had to work with nature,” Alcazaren explains.

The IUCN Global Standard divides NBS into green and blue actions, which involve the use of plants and water bodies respectively.

But the Philippines has lost much of its natural environment heritage, especially its forests. According to Global Forest Watch, only 3 percent of the Philippines’ forests are classified as primary forests.

The Sierra Madre is a mountain range that’s often referred to as the backbone of Luzon, the country’s largest and most populous island. It plays a crucial role in protecting urban areas from flooding, including Metro Manila, one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. 

However, it has lost around 90 percent of its original rainforest, primarily due to illegal logging, mining and quarrying activities.

“We have to recover that mindset and that connection to our land, our culture and the nature that surrounds us to be able to move forward,” says Alcazaren.

That includes developing a flood control masterplan for the country’s major river basins focused on NBS, supported by similar plans at the regional and municipal levels. 

“It would be helpful if we took a longer, deeper look at how we govern our 7,000 islands, and we should really govern them as regions based on the river basins,” he reiterates.

Local solutions to a global problem

One thing is clear: the Philippines’ path to climate resilience must be paved with locally adapted solutions. 

“We cannot get our solutions from overseas,” says Alcazaren. “We have to find it ourselves, because unless we generate the solutions ourselves, we cannot sustain [them] ourselves.”

One promising example is the Iloilo Esplanade, a 1.2-kilometer public park on the island of Panay in the Western Visayas region. 

So far, the project has transformed a former dike road into a green urban space as part of a wider plan to rehabilitate the Iloilo River. It preserves mature mangroves to help prevent flooding and has received global acclaim for its design.

Scaling up these solutions, though, will require massive levels of planning and resources, often to the sum of billions, which must be properly spent on addressing flooding and other calamities.

That will in turn require eliminating corruption, which Transparency International has identified as a major obstacle to global climate action.

Other studies have shown that corruption does more than simply waste money – it actively amplifies both the frequency and consequences of climate disasters.

When funds intended for critical infrastructure such as flood control are misspent or stolen, an entire country’s climate defenses can collapse. This is a systemic failure that forces communities to beg for assistance whenever disasters strike.

The Philippines’ future lies in the hands of its communities, who must be well informed about climate issues as a crucial first step, giving them the power to elect good leaders.

Ultimately, we must learn the importance of working with nature, rather than against it. 

“We’re not only supposed to look at our situation as a human species,” says Alcazaren, “because the other, larger understanding is that we’re part of a complex interconnectedness.”