In ongoing FRLD Board meeting

CAMARINES Sur Rep. LRay Villafuerte is hoping that as the first host-country of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) Board, the Philippines can secure bigger funds for climate finance at the ongoing meeting here of this new apparatus of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was put up by UNFCCC member-states to muster resources for highly vulnerable countries to deal with increasingly violent weather.

“The ongoing meeting of the FRLD Board in the Philippines, which was selected as the inaugural country-host of this UNFCCC-created panel, presents a splendid opportunity for our country to lobby for greater international financial support for climate mitigation and adaptation,” Villafuerte, National Unity Party (NUP) president, said.

The fourth meeting of the FRLD Board started on Monday (Dec. 2) at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) in Pasay City, and will run till Friday (Dec. 5).

On the opening day of the FRLD Board meeting, Natural Resources Secretary Ma. Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga cited the need for “vibrant, strong and inclusive” multilateralism or unified international action to deal with the unique challenges faced by climate-vulnerable countries such as the Philippines.

Yulo-Loyzaga described the Philippines as a “living laboratory for current and future risks” and a “test case” or “a baseline, not only of what climate-vulnerable developing countries will endure in these uncertain and unpredictable times, but also of our capacity to recover, given adequate and timely access to the right resources.”

Villafuerte earlier backed the position of President Marcos, as revealed by Yulo-Loyzaga, that the Philippines should use the recent streak of tropical cyclones that hit the country in less than a month—from severe tropical storm Kristine to super typhoon Pepito over the October-November period—as a “test case” for our country in seeking for climate finance funds as a form of climate justice for loss and damage caused by erratic weather patterns.

Before Yulo-Loyzaga bared President Marcos’ “test case” position last month, Villafuerte proposed at the start of COP29 that the Philippines use Kristine as “Exhibit A” in seeking climate finance funds from overseas in the UNFCCC’s annual summit and in the then-upcoming FRLD Board in the Philippines.

COP29 refers to the 29th annual summit of the UNFCCC or Conference of Parties (COP) on the climate crisis that was held on November 11-22 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and where a deal was struck on increasing the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) or climate finance target to $300 billion, or barely a fourth of the $1.3 trillion in annual financing that high-risk developing economies, including the Philippines, had originally asked for in Baku.

Villafuerte had served a three-term governor of CamSur, which was hardest hit by Kristine that dumped two months-worth of rainfall in a single day on Oct. 24—or almost double than that unleashed by typhoon Ondoy in 2009—that for the first time ever caused above-head or even roof-level floods in many communities across the province.

The former governor said, “It behooves our government to work at the FRLD Board meeting on securing funds from overseas to strengthen the resiliency of our people and their communities against the increasingly calamitous impacts of planet overheating. This is because developing economies including the Philippines managed to secure barely a fourth of the $1.3 trillion in annual NCQG for climate funds that they sought from the world’s wealthiest economies that are also its worst polluters in the recently-concluded COP29 in Baku.”

Worse, he said, although the new climate finance goal is actually triple the original NCQG that was set in COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009 for mobilizing $100 billion by 2020, the rich UNFCCC member-states only committed to come up with this bigger amount not now or next year but by 2035 yet.

“Our country has the moral high ground to seek much larger funds for climate finance because the far-worse-than-expected devastation wrought, for instance, by Kristine on Bicol is Exhibit A to illustrate that the effects of global warming on high-risk countries, resulting from the GHG (greenhouse gas) pollution by affluent economies, are becoming nastier by the day—and thus behooves these heavy polluters to cough up a lot more money for climate finance,” he said.

Moreover, said Villafuerte, “the Philippines is in the best position to lead such a lobby for climate justice and finance as our country was selected as the first host-country of the FRLD Board in last year’s COP28 in the Expo City of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and is now hosting its fourth board meeting at the PICC.”

This FRLD is a loss and damage mechanism set up at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022 and operationalized the following year at COP28.

Just to get an idea of how much resources the government needs for its own climate financing programs, Villafuerte noted that the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) said the Marcos administration set aside a total of P724.9 billion in the 2024 national budget for climate finance and proposed in the 2025 budget plan a total of P1.585 trillion for accelerated climate action.

Although accounting for just 0.3% of global GHG emissions, the Philippines has become a big casualty of the climate crisis, having been battered by highly destructive natural disasters like Yolanda, Ondoy and Kristine.

Delegates and negotiators from developing UNFCCC member-economies including the Philippines had lobbied in the bitterly fought-negotiations for an annual NCQG of $1.3 trillion from the rich industrialized nations largely responsible for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as they cited experts’ projections that vulnerable countries would need as much as $2.4 trillion yearly for climate finance by 2030.

The Philippines, which is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire and the Pacific Typhoon Belt, is one of the 68 members of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), which is the global partnership of countries that, according to the CVF, is “disproportionately affected” by the consequences of climate change.

The Philippines remained at No. 1 on the list of most disaster-prone countries in the face of extreme natural calamities driven by climate change, based on the latest World Risk Index report released in September by the Germany-based Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict at Ruhr University Bochum (IFHV).

Owing to the record damage wrought by Kristine, Villafuerte had proposed in the Congress the establishment of a multi-year P20 billion Bicol Recovery and Rehabilitation Fund (BRRF) for the quick recovery of CamSur and other Bicol provinces devastated by the deadly storm—in the same way that a P10-billion outlay was set up in the for the rehabilitation of Central Luzon provinces ravaged by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.

Villafuerte said the proposed P20-billion BRRF, if and when enacted into law, can finance the revival of the discontinued Bicol River Basin Development Program (BRBDP), which President Marcos himself directed the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to “revisit” and revive beginning in 2025.

The overflow during typhoons of the 3,771 square kilometers (km2)) Bicol River–it is the country’s 8th biggest river system that stretches across CamSur, Camarines Norte and Albay–is a major cause of perennial flooding.

“Climate justice from the world’s heaviest GCG polluters by way of reparations for the loss and damage caused by planet overheating on climate-vulnerable countries is imperative,” Villafuerte said, “because developing economies like the Philippines that have contributed so little to global warming or carbon pollution are the ones bearing the brunt of violent typhoons, severe droughts and other natural disasters.”

CamSur is set to become the center for offshore wind (OSW) energy in the country with 16 OSW projects in the pipeline, including the wind farms to be put up separately by the Danish infrastructure investment firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and the Aboitiz Power Corp. (AboitizPower).

These 16 OSW projects have a total potential capacity of 7,668 megawatts (MW), he said, and will help the Department of Energy (DOE) meet the government’s long-term target of generating 35% of our domestic electricity requirements from renewables by 2030 and an even higher 50% by 2040.

At the end of COP29 and the announcement of the $300-billion NCQG deal, Villafuerte said he was only “cautiously optimistic” that the Philippines and other developing states most devastated by global warming will have access to much larger funds for coping with the impact of our overheating planet, as the wealthiest economies pledged to triple the climate finance target to triple by 2035 yet.

“Given how the world’s most affluent states, which are also its biggest polluters most responsible for planet warming, have stonewalled during COP29 on higher aid for climate mitigation and adaptation of the most vulnerable countries like the Philippines, I am not holding my breath in wait for a lot more funds for climate financing to pour in right away as a premium for climate justice,” Villafuerte said.

He recalled that the original climate financing target of $100 billion was set during COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009, and due for implementation over the 2020-2024 period, but what happened was that the contributions of donors from among UNFCCC member-countries managed to reach $100-billion goal only in 2022.

“The odds, therefore, are that to meet the Philippines’ ambitious NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) of a GHG emission reduction and avoidance of 75% over the 2020-2030 decade—as pledged in COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland in 2021—the operative words for us are still: Sariling Sikap,” he said.

He said, “Our country and government will have to rely on our own initiatives to generate massive funds from here and abroad for spending on a trio of imperatives to strengthen the Philippines’ resiliency against the increasingly violent climate-induced natural disasters like typhoons and droughts.”

He said this trio of imperatives comprises the following: (1) accelerating our switch from heat-trapping fossil fuel to renewables or green energy sources, (2) spending bigger on infrastructure and other initiatives to make our communities more resilient against increasingly calamitous weather events, and (3) lobbying for loss and damage funds as reparation for the loss and damage wrought by climate-driven natural disasters.”

AUTHOR PROFILE

Ryan Ponce Pacpaco