Climate action for sustainability and resilience

The national leaders and policymakers whom we will install in next month’s elections must be prepared to sustainably steer our country and the economy amid the growing dire consequences of climate change.

This is after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its third leg of the climate change report, hinted that prevailing climate actions are falling behind in their commitments to limiting global temperature below pre-industrial levels.

While the Philippines has a minimal share in the global carbon emissions, a mere 0.39% in 2020, it remains to be among the most vulnerable and heavily affected by climate-induced risks. 

This risk amplifier cannot be understated, as it already affects individual Filipinos’ daily lives as well as the different aspects of our macro socio-economic activities.

This issue is more than just a matter of how our country could reduce its total carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Rather, it is a matter of accelerating equitable climate actions that would also allow our country to address possible trade-offs attributed to them.

Strengthening infrastructure modernization

No doubt, our next leaders must aim for the country to contribute to the global climate change movement. But they must not lose sight of the immediate and impending challenges at hand. 

They must strategically adopt the right policies and pragmatic frameworks that would enhance the country’s resilience to calamities and advance sustainability across sectors in the long run. Particularly, upgrade and modernize our public infrastructure and services in the context of sustainable development. 

This is because physical risks associated with climate change put public infrastructures and services at the forefront of climate-induced challenges. Our next leaders should establish an enabling environment that would effectively strengthen and develop more climate-resilient and digital-enabled infrastructures. 

New infrastructure projects need to be planned and designed, taking into account changes in weather patterns and rising global temperature that will occur over their lifetime. Existing infrastructure, on the other hand, needs to be retrofitted to further strengthen their capabilities to cope with the uncertainties of climate change and possible calamities. 

Moreover, both new and existing infrastructure need to take advantage of emerging digital technologies for better, well-informed, and effective decision-making of design and services.

For one, electricity grids should be modernized. This addresses not only the short-term needs of providing power to communities and industries but also people’s need for a healthier and safer environment.

Policies that enable innovation while building capacity will significantly bring value to this agenda. Likewise, innovation in competition policy, such as fixed-price bids, carve-out clauses, and uniform force-majeure provisions mandatory in power purchase contracts, could bring about a swift equitable low-carbon energy transition.

Private sector initiatives

Corporations, their leaders and employees have their work cut out for them as well. They must quickly move from upgrade and modernization plans to action.

And there have been some initiatives toward this objective. Other companies have also invested in the training and upgrading of people’s skills – human capital – so they could better respond to the changing demands of the times and participate better in the future of work.

Responsible companies, who are ever-cognizant of their commitment to a more resilient Philippines, have been integrating technology-driven processes in their facilities and premises – renewable energy initiatives, low-carbon investments, modern fuel cell and cooling systems, direct current hybrid generators, and storage batteries to name a few.

Globe Telecom continues to upgrade and modernize its business operation across the country. The company will establish a green and low-carbon optical access network which is expected to cut power consumption and heat dissipation by 50%.

Its Intelligent Optical Network Terminal (ONT) would help its customers in terms of identifying energy consumption since it utilizes an Intelligent Application Performance Management (APM) program that detects device energy usage at the same time, manages up to 30% power savings.

On fast-moving consumer goods, Mondelez Philippines and Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines Inc., besides their circular economy initiatives on plastic waste, have also been undergoing modernization. Their company operation is constantly transitioning the electricity consumption of their facilities to 100% renewable such as geothermal and solar power.

Meanwhile, the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation (PDRF) built in Clark, Pampanga the world’s first-ever private sector-led national-level emergency operations center that is capable of tracking weather patterns and natural calamities in the country. Their Liveable Cities Challenge Dashboard, together with Globe, also utilizes data visualization of about 142 cities and enables local officials to quickly spot trends and their correlation for effective decision-making and help them diagnose areas for improvement.

Policy adjustments that are conducive to business innovation, such as those I mentioned above, will pave the way for other enterprises to shift to sustainable energy sources for their infrastructure and operations.

On top of this, a greater shift to renewables, and constant upgrade and modernization of the private sector towards climate-resilient infrastructures will significantly contribute to services’ reliability and accessibility in the country. 

Greater and more strategic public-private partnership

The new administration should take advantage of this challenge to strategically collaborate with the private sector in institutionalizing these initiatives and best practices across the archipelago, and across various industries.

The policies, frameworks, and agenda of the next administration should complement shared advocacy of establishing sustainable, technology-driven, and climate-resilient infrastructure that can boost development, create more jobs, reduce environmental footprints and impacts, and enhance sustainability and resiliency for the long-term.

The effectiveness of our current response now to climate change and its chronic impact will determine how sustainable our future will be. Inadequate and minor reactive responses are mere band aid solutions and will not reduce the risks to our nation’s resiliency and sustainability amidst the certain onslaught of calamitous weather events.

It is with urgency that these risks be addressed head-on with strategically aligned policies and programs that fosters more aggressive interventions and impactful action by government in partnership with the private sector and all of society participation.

Engineer Felix Vitangcol is a fellow for Environment at the Stratbase ADR Institute and secretary-general of Philippine Business for Environmental Stewardship.