TWIN CRISIS: Iloilo City drains its floods, then buys water back – study

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

An Iloilo-based policy think tank is pressing for a basin-level rethink of how Iloilo manages water, arguing that flooding and water scarcity are two faces of the same problem and must be solved through one integrated agenda.

The Institute of Contemporary Economics (ICE) laid out the advocacy in a June 2026 policy proposal, calling for an Integrated Water Strategy that manages rainfall, runoff, drainage, storage, groundwater, waste, settlements, and supply as one urban water system.

The advocacy has also been discussed with the Iloilo Provincial Government and the Office of Civil Defense Region VI, with the discussions centering on the need to view the problem at basin level and to integrate solutions for water scarcity and the management of excess seasonal water.

“Iloilo City cannot afford to treat floodwater as a problem in one season and water scarcity as a separate problem in another. The same city, the same residents, and the same water system are affected,” the proposal stated.

ICE argued that the current condition also reflects older failures of follow-through, including flood-control planning under the JICA-supported master plan that was never carried to completion and utility commitments that fell short of what residents were promised.

The think tank’s water-supply review found that the Metro Iloilo Bulk Water Supply Corporation (MIBWSC) was mandated to deliver 170 million liters per day (MLD) as the system’s upstream backbone, but actual delivery was estimated at only 30 to 50 MLD.

The same review identified a 139-MLD supply shortfall, leaving the system around 63 percent short of a total requirement estimated at 219 MLD.

Service coverage was estimated at about 26 percent, leaving roughly 74 percent of the concession area without piped access, while non-revenue water remained at around 39 to 40 percent.

Even under an optimistic scenario that counts a possible 42-MLD allocation from JRMP II, a planned 66.5-MLD desalination plant, and improved bulk delivery to raise aggregate supply to about 188 MLD, the system would still fall roughly 31 MLD short, ICE said.

The proposal urged the city to press the Metro Iloilo Water District (MIWD), MIBWSC, and Metro Pacific Iloilo Water (MPIW) to account for the gap between contractual commitments and public outcomes, and to seek publication of the MIWD joint venture agreements and relevant annexes, subject only to narrowly justified redactions.

Households and businesses shoulder the cost of the gap through coping mechanisms, with commercial water delivery reaching roughly PHP 150 to PHP 250 per cubic meter, far above normal utility pricing, according to the study.

On flooding, ICE said the Jaro Floodway reduced pressure on the urban core but left the wider basin logic incomplete, with upstream runoff, floodplain loss, sedimentation, tide-locked drainage, waste-clogged canals, and settlement exposure still interacting with a denser, more paved city.

The city’s exposure is compounded by its low-lying position, with 90 percent of its land area at about 2.64 meters above mean sea level, and reported land subsidence of up to 8.8 millimeters per year in certain districts, which ICE linked partly to groundwater extraction driven by unreliable formal supply.

Storage, the proposal argued, is the physical link between flood control and water security. ICE estimated that nature-based systems in Metro Iloilo could contribute 600 to 1,300 million liters of distributed storage toward a 2,000-million-liter basin target, or up to 65 percent at the high end.

Green infrastructure was costed at PHP 5 million to PHP 18 million per million liters of storage, against PHP 25 million to PHP 60 million for conventional grey storage. A grey-dominant system was estimated at about PHP 80 billion, compared with roughly PHP 50 billion for a hybrid configuration, implying around PHP 30 billion in avoided capital spending.

The strategy is organized around six pillars: flood disruption reduction and tidal drainage operations; urban storage, sponge city, and basin retention; water supply reliability and demand management; waste-to-drainage protection and circular waste management; informal settler family (ISF) waterway, sanitation, and settlement risk reduction; and project preparation, financing, and intergovernmental advocacy.

ICE estimated the ISF issue at approximately 22,000 families, or roughly 90,000 to 110,000 residents — close to one-fifth of the city’s 2024 population of 473,728 — and recommended a differentiated approach combining in-situ upgrading, reblocking, partial retreat, near-site consolidation, and relocation only for extreme-risk sites.

The proposal credited the city’s existing initiatives, including the Iloilo River rehabilitation, the expansion of mangrove cover along the river from 35 to around 85 hectares, more than 100,000 mangroves planted since 2010, the relocation of around 5,000 informal settlers from the river area, and the PHP 2.3-billion Integrated Solid Waste Management Facility in Barangay Ingore, La Paz.

That facility is designed to process 475 tons of solid waste per day and 115 tons of septage from MPIW, and to generate up to 3.5 megawatts of power to support a desalination plant scheduled to begin operations in 2027.

The city has also accepted Aboitiz InfraCapital’s proposal for the Iloilo Bulk Water Supply Project, expected to provide 80 MLD of potable treated water over a 33-year concession, with Aboitiz later receiving Original Proponent Status for an 86-MLD proposal.

Rather than creating a new permanent office, ICE recommended a Mayor-led task force using existing city machinery, with the City Planning and Development Office as planning lead, the City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office as operational risk co-lead, and the City Engineer’s Office as technical infrastructure lead.

For the next two years, the proposal set an agenda that includes creating the task force, activating six workstreams, preparing a City Water Risk and Action Map, completing drainage and floodgate inventories, launching three to five storage pilots, producing a City Water Balance Dashboard, linking Project AGUBAY waste data to drainage-risk locations, classifying ISF waterway exposure, and preparing 10 to 15 project sheets.

Larger investments would be prepared for national agencies, utilities, public-private partnerships, official development assistance, multilateral development banks, and climate finance, guided by indicative planning envelopes of PHP 15 billion for Iloilo River flood-resilience infrastructure, PHP 8 billion for a Metro Iloilo smart drainage and pump network, PHP 22.5 billion for coastal protection and blue infrastructure, and PHP 35 billion for a wider Panay–Guimaras water-security platform.

ICE stressed that these figures are planning estimates, not approved project costs or proposed city appropriations, and that the two-year goal is implementation readiness rather than solving the entire basin problem within one term.