Congress must pass the coastal greenbelt law now

The number that should stop every Ilonggo cold is not a typhoon count. It is PHP 255 billion — the 2026 flood control budget the government itself scrapped after the Senate blue ribbon committee traced 673 ghost or substandard projects over a decade of public works.

Finance Secretary Ralph Recto’s own people put the bleed at PHP 42.3 billion to PHP 118.5 billion from 2023 to 2025 alone. Money that built nothing, or built dikes that failed, while the water kept rising and coastal families absorbed the loss in flooded homes and lost catch.

So when Oceana asks Congress to fast-track the National Coastal Greenbelt Act before this rainy season, it is not begging for another line item. It is pointing at the cheaper option that has sat in the legislative drawer for most of a decade.

Consider the arithmetic. Restoring a hectare of mangroves costs, by recent global estimates, a median of around USD 2,000, with higher averages near USD 10,000. A concrete seawall costs far more per kilometer — and depreciates from the day it is poured. Mangroves do the opposite. They thicken, spread, and recover after a storm. They also feed people: the forest that blunts a surge is a nursery for the fish coastal families sell.

We have the proof in our own water. The Iloilo River Esplanade, once a near-dead channel, now holds more than two million mangrove seedlings and propagules along its banks — and the greenery raised property values instead of sinking them. Leganes turned 15 hectares of abandoned fishponds back into mangroves. Nationwide, 127 local governments have passed greenbelt ordinances without waiting for Manila. The model works. What is missing is a national law to scale and defend it.

That law is now caught in a familiar trap. In the House, the greenbelt measure is being weighed alongside a broader Integrated Coastal Management Act. Backers of the integrated route are not wrong that coastlines need coordinated management. But merging the two is efficient mainly on paper. In practice, the mangrove buffer would compete for attention with shipping, tourism, and — tellingly — reclamation, the very activity that erases coastlines. A standalone bill, with one lead agency, firm targets, and dedicated funding, is harder to water down and harder to quietly bury.

None of this makes mangroves a miracle. Planting fails when the species or the site is wrong, and the much-quoted 75-percent cut in wave height applies to wide, mature belts, not a thin fringe of seedlings. Honest advocacy should admit that. But a defense that sometimes underperforms still beats one that is invoiced, photographed, and never built.

Iloilo knows the price of getting coastlines wrong. The city is “sinking” roughly nine millimeters a year per studies  by UP, and its council is still untangling how protected mangrove zones ended up under private land titles. The rains will not wait. Congress should pass the greenbelt bill on its own, and let the next surge break on something alive.