Philippines: 1c. Pre-Conference - Colonial Context

Environment   Sep 11, 2017 by Luis Miguel Esguerra

Thinking back to your carbon footprint, consider how the footprint, power imbalances, and the effects of climate change are connected. How does your footprint reflect the economy of your country, including its colonial relations?

Before tackling the overall economic situation of the Philippines, I believe that the development differences between places needs to be underlined and highlighted. There is this concept called ‘Imperial Manila’, which I believe has its roots in our colonial history when Manila is the capital of the Spanish and American governments in the Philippine Islands, and is still with us presently.

I live in this Imperial Manila, based on how the national budget was distributed among the regions for the past few years, this idea is still true, though it is somewhat changing based on the most recent budget in terms of development allocations.

Anyhow, Metro Manila is a highly urbanized large city, and thus its citizens live in an urban setting which includes high carbon footprints and high consumption of resources. My consumption does reflect the economic situation of the area that I am in. But then if you would go to the provinces, it is entirely different to the Metropolitan Manila in that everything is simpler there and most of their consumption goes to their agriculture.

As for our relations with our colonizers, we are heavily influenced in terms of our choices of consumption, we call it ‘Colonial Mentality’. What this means is that we, me included, are more favorable towards American products and products from the West in general.

How are the effects of climate change related with power imbalances among countries or within countries?

The problem with regards to our action in resolving the climate change issue would be the differences between countries as well as the power imbalances between groups and countries. The biggest producers of greenhouse gases, the gases that are causing climate change, are also pivotal to the world economy and as such they hold a large influence in geopolitics, such as the United States of America and China.

With regards to within countries, there are businesses and certain sectors in politics that has a bigger say and/or power compared to groups that are campaigning for the environment. One such example would be what happened in the Philippines recently when the Secretary of our Environmental department, Gina Lopez, was rejected by the Commission on Appointments.

The rumor goes is that the mining companies has had a hand on her rejection from the spot due to her position on mining in the Philippines, in that she is against it. While nothing is placed in stone when it comes to facts in politics, it does show that there is an imbalance between powers, in that we do not know who is really calling the shots in some issues.

However, there are some visible actions of imbalances, such as how the United States, the biggest producer of greenhouse gases, has decided to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement and we can’t do much about it since they have the geopolitical influence and the economic power.

The saddest thing about all this would be who gets the boot kicked into their faces, so to speak, and who are mostly safe from the drastic and serious effects of climate change. It is the smaller countries that are affected the most, and they do not even have much wealth to easily repair the damages left behind by these drastic effects. Meanwhile, the larger and wealthier countries are not affected as much.

Let me put it this way, Typhoon Haiyan had cost the Philippines 571 Billion pesos (or 11 Million Dollars) worth of damage, that’s against the National GDP at the time which was slated at 271.8 billion Dollars, that may be a huge difference on paper, but how about the actual people being affected, those that have actually collectively lost 571 Billion pesos plus some of them have lost their loved ones as well?

I mean sure, the National Government did help and had allocated a budget to help them, but how about other matters not regarding money, such as rescue efforts and preparations. In disasters, it’s the loss of life that is the most tragic, not the lost of money. The aid to the most affected and battered areas of Haiyan took a week at the most, and I have been following the news when it happened and it was slow.

It wouldn’t be that bad, even though it already was bad with the fact that the National Government cannot immediately mobilize in the wake of a disaster, if only the international community had not noticed how slow the response was, which they did notice and even the UN aid chief called the National Government out. (Yikes, it is an embarrassing fact to us.)

My point is that the nations in the firing line are the third world countries, those that do not have much efficient emergency response teams. Again, the most dire of consequences of any disaster would be the loss of life, and these losses sometimes happen because of slow response times.

To summarize, the third world countries are most affected, they are counties without much capability compared to the U.S. and other rich countries when it comes to emergency response or influence in the geopolitical stage, and the third world countries are NOT the major contributors to climate change, and yet they receive the brunt of it. That is unfair, that is beyond unfair, we’re not talking about a rich man and a poor person, we’re talking about countries with people from different walks of life being affected by something being indirectly caused by countries that are not that badly affected by climate change.

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