Philippines community action

The Philippines ( (listen); Filipino: Pilipinas), officially the Republic of the Philippines (Filipino: Republika ng Pilipinas), is an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It is situated in the western Pacific Ocean and consists of around 7,641 islands that are broadly categorized under three main geographical divisions from north to south: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The Philippines is bounded by the South China Sea to the west, the Philippine Sea to the east, and the Celebes Sea to the southwest. It shares maritime borders with Taiwan to the north, Japan to the northeast, Palau to the east and southeast, Indonesia to the south, Malaysia to the southwest, Vietnam to the west, and China to the northwest. The Philippines covers an area of 343,448 km² (132,606 sq mi)and, as of 2021, it had a population of around 109 million people, making it the world's thirteenth-most-populous country. The Philippines has diverse ethnicities and cultures throughout its islands. Manila is the country's capital, while the largest city is Quezon City; both lie within the urban area of Metro Manila.

Negritos, some of the archipelago's earliest inhabitants, were followed by successive waves of Austronesian peoples. Adoption of animism, Hinduism and Islam established island-kingdoms called kedatuan, rajahnates, and sultanates. The arrival of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer leading a fleet for Spain, marked the beginning of Spanish colonization. In 1543, Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villaloboscode: spa promoted to code: es named the archipelago Las Islas Filipinas in honor of Philip II of Spain. Spanish settlement through Mexico, beginning in 1565, led to the Philippines becoming ruled by the Spanish Empire for more than 300 years. During this time, Catholicism became the dominant religion, and Manila became the western hub of trans-Pacific trade. In 1896, the Philippine Revolution began, which then became entwined with the 1898 Spanish–American War. Spain ceded the territory to the United States, while Filipino revolutionaries declared the First Philippine Republic. The ensuing Philippine–American War ended with the United States establishing control over the territory, which they maintained until the Japanese invasion of the islands during World War II. Following liberation, the Philippines became independent in 1946. Since then, the unitary sovereign state has often had a tumultuous experience with democracy, which included the overthrow of a decades-long dictatorship by a nonviolent revolution.

Activist groups associated with the climate movement have called for government action and have organized activities to raise public awareness on climate and related environmental, sociopolitical, and economic issues. Philippine activists have, for example, taken part in the global climate strike, joining demands for political leaders to urgently address the climate emergency.

Below are some protest actions and social movements associated with climate change in the Philippines.

• In 2021, activists stood outside the Standard Chartered office to protest the bank's funding of the coal industry. Standard Chartered is the biggest funder of the coal industry in the Philippines.
• As part of its policy advocacy, Greenpeace Philippines released an open letter in 2019 urging President Rodrigo Duterte to declare a climate change emergency to make climate change and its impacts a top government priority.
• The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines issued a pastoral letter in 2019 instructing dioceses to make caring for the environment a special concern in the face of the climate emergency.
• Fisherfolk organization Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya) protested in Mendiola in 2020 to urge the Philippine government to address the impacts of climate change on fisherfolk. The group also called for an end to reclamation projects to preserve the marine ecosystem and protect millions of people from flooding and dislocation.
• Kalikasan People's Network for the Environment joined the 2015 International Human Rights Day protests to raise concern over the plight of climate refugees.
• Peasants, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, and other grassroots communities organized various protests in 2015 calling on government to end large-scale mining projects and address the root causes of the climate crisis.

Renewable energy in the Philippines is being expanded including with offshore wind power. A Pulse Asia survey conducted in 2018 revealed that 97% of energy consumers in Metro Manila favor the utilization of renewable energy. The government is making an adaptation plan.

Mangrove forests have proven to be an efficient and environmentally friendly solution to the effects of coastal hazards. Extensive mangrove rehabilitation projects have been undertaken in the Philippines.

Recognizing the Philippines’ considerable disaster risk, there is considerable need for disaster risk reduction and preparedness as well as humanitarian relief efforts. The Philippines institutionalizes the humanitarian cluster approach, and it plans and administers disaster relief through its National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC). NDRRMC also oversees the 18 regional Disaster Risk Reduction Management Councils (LDRRMCs), which in turn supervise disaster risk reduction and management operations at the provincial, city, and barangay levels (barangay is the lowest level of government, similar to the "village" level).

Climate change in the Philippines is having serious impacts such as increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, sea level rise, extreme rainfall, resource shortages, and environmental degradation. All of these impacts together have greatly affected the Philippines' agriculture, water, infrastructure, human health, and coastal ecosystems and they are projected to continue having devastating damages to the economy and society of the Philippines.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Philippines is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. The archipelago of 7,109 islands is situated along the Pacific Ocean's typhoon belt, leaving the country vulnerable to an average of 20 typhoons every year, five of which are destructive. Most recent of these typhoons occurred in the Cebu region of the Philippines in December 2021. Known colloquially as Typhoon Odette, Typhoon Odette caused around a billion dollars (₱51.8 billion) in infrastructure and agricultural damages and displaced about 630,000 people. The United Nations estimated that Typhoon Odette impacted the livelihoods of 13 million people, destroying their homes and leaving them without adequate food or water supplies. More tragically, the physical and economic repercussions of Typhoon Odette led to the death of over 400 people as of December 2021.

In addition to the Philippines' close proximity to the Pacific Ocean's typhoon belt, the Philippines is also located within the “Pacific Ring of Fire" which makes the country prone to frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Compounding these issues, the impacts of climate change, such as accelerated sea level rise, exacerbate the state's high susceptibility to natural disasters, like flooding and landslides. Aside from geography, climate change impacts regions with a history of colonization more intensely than regions without a history of colonization. Colonized regions experience the repercussions of climate change most jarringly "because of their high dependence on natural resources, their geographical and climatic conditions and their limited capacity to effectively adapt to a changing climate." Since low-income countries have a history of colonialism and resource exploitation, their environment lacks the diversity necessary to prevail against natural disasters. A lack of biodiversity reduces the resilience of a specific region, leaving them more susceptible to natural disasters and the effects of climate change. With its history of Spanish colonization, the Philippines is not environmentally nor economically equipped to overcome issues it is currently dealing with, such as natural disasters and climate change. This inability to recover exacerbates the problem, creating a cycle of environmental and economic devastation in the country.

The wildlife of the Philippines includes a significant number of endemic plant and animal species. The country's surrounding waters reportedly have the highest level of marine biodiversity in the world. The Philippines is considered one of the seventeen megadiverse countries as well as global biodiversity hotspot. In the 2000 Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), 418 of the country's 52,177 species were listed as threatened.

The Philippines has among the highest rates of discovery in the world with sixteen new species of mammals discovered in the last ten years. Because of this, the rate of endemism for the Philippines has risen and likely will continue to rise.

Community pantries in the Philippines are food banks established by Filipinos during the country's COVID-19 community quarantine.

On April 14, 2021, local entrepreneur Ana Patricia Non worked with farmers and local vegetable vendors to put up a small food bank for her community on Maginhawa Street in Quezon City, putting up a sign that invited people to "give according to your ability, take according to your need." The initiative caught the attention of Filipinos on social media, creating a "snowball effect", with citizens putting up their own pantries in their communities and inspiring people from other countries do the same.

Initiated without any government support, some of the community pantries and their organizers were initially interrogated and red-tagged by National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) spokesperson Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr. and Presidential Communications Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy-Partosa as possible sympathizers and recruiters of insurgent left-wing militant organizations.

By April 20, 2021, press reports noted that there were already more than a hundred citizen-organized community pantries throughout the Philippines. On April 22, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported that there were already at least 350 such pantries throughout the country.