Climate policy keeps failing because it ignores lived experience

There is a new climate anthology coming out of Iloilo, written not by scientists or policy consultants but by students who spent time in coastal and farming communities across the province. The project, guided by a decolonized research framework rooted in pakikipagkwentuhan and pakikisama — conversation and deep immersion — chose to let communities in San Joaquin, Tigbauan, and other vulnerable towns tell their own climate stories.

It is, on the surface, a book launch. But what it actually does is expose a flaw in how climate policy gets made in places like Iloilo — and across the Philippines more broadly. The people who live through flooding, coastal erosion, declining fish catch, and crop failure are rarely the ones shaping the response. They are data points. They are sources. They are almost never authors.

And that matters, because bad listening produces bad policy.

Consider the numbers. In 2024 alone, the Department of Agriculture recorded PHP 57.8 billion in agricultural losses from El Niño, typhoons, and volcanic activity. More than 1.4 million farmers and fisherfolk were affected. Western Visayas was the hardest-hit region during El Niño, absorbing PHP 678.7 million in agricultural damage. In Iloilo province specifically, successive storms in late 2025 caused PHP 26 million in crop damage, wiping out over 96 hectares with no chance of recovery. These are not abstract projections. These are people watching their livelihoods vanish, season after season.

Yet when government and institutions respond, the consultation process is often designed for experts. The 2020 Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment of Iloilo City, conducted by Manila Observatory and the University of the Philippines Visayas, produced valuable hazard maps and vulnerability indices. But the methodology centered on institutional data — barangay situationers, census numbers, spatial analysis. Communities appeared as units of analysis, not as participants in meaning-making.

This is where the anthology pushes back. Gelera’s approach — asking students to abandon rigid, outsider-designed questionnaires and instead sit with people, share meals, listen without extracting — challenges a deep habit in Philippine development work. The argument is not that science is wrong. It is that how we gather stories is never neutral. Method reflects power. When fisherfolk in Bantayan or farmers in Antique are engaged through technical formats that flatten their experience, institutions end up hearing only what fits their framework.

The OECD’s 2026 Economic Survey of the Philippines confirmed what communities already know: the poorest households, concentrated in disaster-prone regions including Western Visayas, face the highest risks of mortality, income loss, and long-term impoverishment from climate shocks. Weather-related damages may cost up to 3% of GDP annually. And extreme weather events can reduce local economic activity by up to 2.2% on impact, with effects persisting five years later.

So here is the uncomfortable question: if the people bearing these costs are not meaningfully shaping adaptation strategy, who exactly is adaptation for?

There’s another dimension worth noting. Youth climate action in the Philippines often gets reduced to tree planting, beach cleanups, and social media campaigns — the kind of symbolic volunteerism that looks good in annual reports. Iloilo’s provincial government launched Tanum Iloilo in 2019, targeting 1.5 million trees. That’s commendable. But this anthology represents something harder than planting a seedling. These students did the work of witnessing, interpreting, and constructing public memory from communities whose experiences rarely make it into mainstream climate discourse.

Climate stories are not literary extras. They belong at the center of how Iloilo — and the rest of Western Visayas — plans its future, because they reveal what no hazard map can: how climate change is already reorganizing migration, food security, local history, and social trust. Until the people on the margins stop being sources of data and start being recognized as authors of truth, climate action in this region will remain shallow, expensive, and prone to repeating the same mistakes.