Let’s Talk About Money and Climate Change

By John Leo Algo

2025 for the Philippines is not just defined by the elections. It is also defined by change against climate change.

This year would see the country update or introduce new plans and policies that would set the direction of how it would address the climate crisis. These would cover different aspects, including the long-term plan for reducing emissions, enabling a just transition towards national sustainable development, and localizing adaptation to extreme impacts.

Yet all of these would require a lot of finance to be fully executed. After a year that saw Filipinos go from enduring heatwaves to bracing themselves for six storms in a span of one month, never before has it been more important to enable and empower local governments and communities to initiate solutions.

To achieve this, however, there are many issues that need to be addressed, starting with our laws.

FUND LOCALLY

As important as the passage of the Climate Change Act was in 2009, one of its glaring flaws is that it did not provide a dedicated funding for climate solutions, similar to the Local Disaster Risk Reduction Management Fund (LDRRMF). This resulted in the amendment to the law a few years later that created the People’s Survival Fund (PSF) to support local adaptation projects.

Yet it took more than a decade before its initial budget was even fully utilized due to bureaucratic inefficiencies that prevent access by local government units (LGUs). Even if efficiently disbursed, a P1-billion sum is nowhere near enough to reduce vulnerabilities and increase climate resilience of more than 1,500 cities and municipalities across the country.

In an effort to address this, an inter-agency policy was enacted in 2013 to enable the LDRRMF to be used for adaptation measures, such as conducting risk assessments to be integrated into several LGU plans and implementing community-based monitoring systems.

Despite these efforts, the LDRRMFs have not been fully or properly used across many LGUs. Many local officials still lack the capacity for conducting such risk assessments and mapping or maintain a database that could inform both disaster management and adaptation.

The national-level financing is also not as effective as it appears. The 2025 climate budget is actually double the amount from the previous year, with 87% allotted for adaptation.

However, much of this funding is allotted to flood control projects and the construction, repair, or retrofitting of roads (including farm-to-market roads), bridges, and other infrastructure. While important interventions, their respective allocations face several issues.

One of these is that many of these projects have been ineffective, as seen in 2024 alone where several communities reported some of the worst flooding they have ever experienced. Prolonged periods for their completion and perceived corruption have also plagued many of them.

Another issue is that the current lack of a comprehensive climate finance strategy. While currently being developed with government partners, its absence has contributed to the lack of alignment in climate-related budget allocations with intended adaptation priorities, incoherence of climate-related policies among government agencies, and an uneven allocation of public funds among said agencies.

Under the 2025 national climate budget, the Department of Public Works and Highways account for by far the highest share and increase in allotment from 2024. On the other hand, the Department of the Interior and Local Government received one of the biggest decreases.

What all of these evidences show is that for a country that urgently needs to further empower its local governments and communities for climate action, the national government so far has kept falling short of giving them enough resources and capacity-building to do so. The lack of multi-scenario and probabilistic analysis of numerous local projects is another indicator of this unfortunate reality.

THINK NATIONALLY

With all the proposed bills in Congress to fill in existing gaps related to climate action, a track that has not been as explored in recent years is amending existing laws.

An amendment to either the Climate Change Act or the National DRRM Act to directly include adaptation as part of the scope of activities under the LDRRMF would hold more legal weight than the current policy.

It would also give a stronger and clearer signal to LGUs that the 70% portion of the LDRRMF that is for disaster mitigation, prevention, and preparedness can also be used to fund adaptation solutions, as part of their respective Local Climate Change Action Plans (LCCAPs).

Another policy reform is clearly defining who handles the climate agenda at the LGU level. Under the Climate Change Act, the local chief executive assigns who leads the formulation and implementation of LCCAPs, which makes it prone to instability from potential short-term political turnover.

An amendment to the Climate Change Act to address this issue, such as creating new plantilla positions at the LGU level or designating an existing LGU department as the responsible entity, would go a long way in further empowering locally-led climate actions.

Further empowering the Climate Change Commission (CCC), the country’s lead advisory policymaking body on the climate crisis, is also a necessity.

For example, several of the proposed bills have provisions that provide added responsibilities to the agency, whose growing mandate has not been matched by its received support in terms of sufficient personnel, resources, and capacities. This is a problem that has persisted almost since its inception more than a decade ago, which needs to be remedied.

All of these recommendations have to be complemented by policy and decision-making aligned with good governance. As the Philippines updates many of its climate policies and plans for 2025, the government has the responsibility to ensure coherence among all of them, especially with the annual national climate budget, to implement them properly, and to do so with a genuine “whole-of-society” approach.

Just as importantly, decision-makers need to fully embrace a proactive approach to climate governance over the reactionary one that has dominated for the past few decades. Sooner or later, Filipinos will learn. It might as well be sooner.

John Leo Algo is the national coordinator of Aksyon Klima Pilipinas and the deputy executive director for programs and campaigns of Living Laudato Si’ Philippines. He is also a member of the Youth Advisory Group for Environmental and Climate Justice under the UNDP in Asia and the Pacific. He has been a climate and environment journalist since 2016.