Dry promises

The sky above Panay is drying up, and the people in charge are pointing at a dam that isn’t there yet.

The state weather bureau has laid it out plainly: an intensifying “Super El Niño” will choke Western Visayas from December 2026 to March 2027. And what is our grand lifeline? The Jalaur River Multi-Purpose Project Stage II (JRMP II). It’s a beautiful promise – an engineering marvel designed to save us all. But here is the cold, hard math. As of June 2026, JRMP II was sitting at 86.16 percent complete. It will not be fully operational until 2028. We are staring down the barrel of a crippling, six-month drought right now, and our leaders are banking on a solution that is still two years away. Who is accountable for this gap? What emergency contingency plans are local government units hiding in their filing cabinets while the clock runs out?

Do not limit your imagination to brown lawns and dusty cars. We are looking at a brutal, compounding triple threat. When the taps run dry, the heat surges. When the heat surges, the grid groans under the desperate demand for air-conditioning. It is a domino effect of misery. Who bears the brunt? Not the executives in their generator-powered, climate-controlled offices. It is the working-class families watching their electricity bills spike by PHP 1,500 just to keep their children from collapsing of heatstroke in unventilated rooms. It is the Panay agricultural sector – the farmers who watch the earth crack open while waiting for irrigation that will not arrive. They are the ones swallowing the real-world consequences of a simultaneous water, power, and health crisis.

And yet, if you listen to the press briefings, you hear the same tired music. Officials toss around phrases like “nature-based solutions” and a “whole-of-government approach.” It is rhetorical novocaine. We do not need buzzwords. We need measurable action, executed this very month. If the ground is going to bake by December, local leaders must immediately investigate the logistics and fast-track the distribution of drought-tolerant seeds to our farmers. We need urban cooling centers set up in every vulnerable district before the heat index hits critical levels, not after the hospitals are overrun. Tell us exactly how many liters of water are in reserve, and exactly how it gets to the people when the rivers turn to mud.

Because this drought exposes a systemic illusion we have lived with for far too long. Iloilo City likes to project an image of self-sustaining progress, a booming metropolis charting its own destiny. The coming months will prove that is a lie. The city’s survival is entirely tethered to the province’s natural resources. Extreme climate events are permanently erasing the operational borders between urban centers and rural suppliers. We cannot separate the skyscraper from the dried-out reservoir.

The city drinks what the province bleeds.