National Climate Change Consciousness Week 2019

Pasay City, November 19, 2019

PHOTOS: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SW5pH8vImcMGQKSw85q7kur4zZXGj8j8?usp=sharing

With the theme “Adapting for a Sustainable Future”, the 12th annual Global Warming and Climate Change Consciousness Week, featured the voices of local government units with ambitious climate action plans in their event entitled “Making Climate Finance Count: Increasing Flows for Adaptation”.

The event highlighted the climate finance mechanisms, both national (People’s Survival Fund) and international (Green Climate Fund), that are available for local government units in the Philippines; and further highlighted the experiences that have been successful, and that are currently applying to access those finance mechanisms. Among the LGUs invited were Sangguniang Bayan Secretary Rectito Melquiades from Guiuan, Eastern Samar, and Engr. Fernando Lopez from Coron, Palawan , both with active bids for climate finance, together with Vice Mayor Alfredo Coro and John Largo from Del Carmen and Lanuza, Surigao del Norte respectively, whose LGUs are among the first few proponents that have been able to access the People’s Survival Fund.

Some valuable insights shared by the LGU representatives are shared below: 

“…Do not plan for a three-year term. It should be a nine-year term because there’s no Financial Climate Adaptation Program that works for three years. You have to have a clear direction of how to access financing for every term that you have. For your first term normally, you have local financing that’s available; the second term you have credibility so most of your partner NGOs will come in and provide technical support for you to build on the bigger access to financing on your third term.” – Vice Mayor Alfredo Coro, Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte

“So, one of the learn- learnings that we were able to impart with CCC was to capitalize on nearby state universities or colleges within your area to work with you on the proposal. So– then as you move along, because ours was really long. It took us three years. We have to be ready to change the human resource requirements. For example, there might be changes in terms of political leadership. There might be changes in terms of your own technical people that are working with you. You have to be ready to adjust your people’s capacity towards which phase of the project, whether it’s from project conceptualization to development towards the implementation. So that’s for me.” – Vice Mayor Alfredo Coro, Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte

“The help of the technical people from the partner and non-working government organizations helps a lot in crafting with our proposal. And our strategy also is that we conducted a series of multi-stakeholders’ consultations so that we can get all the information to address the hazards that we are confronting with the impact of climate change”.  – John Largo, Lanuza, Surigao del Norte

“There’s still the LCCAP, the Local Climate Change Act- Action Plan which is a mandated plan with the LGU. But when we saw that the LCCAP was a very broad listing of projects, we tried to make it more focus on our climate actions, measures that we have to address and prioritize. And so, we came up with the Climate Change Adaptation Framework and from there, we were able to narrow down our priorities to goals which currently, water resource management. And of course, there’s still the ecosystem management and restoration that we need to address. So that’s about– I think that’s where we were able to formally or formally the proposal that we submitted to the PSF.” – Rectito Melquiades, GRSDGR, Guiuan, Eastern Samar

“The LCCAP is a long and difficult process, but the CCAF focuses on the systems of interest that need to be prioritized – those that need to be addressed right away and most vulnerable within the community. That’s the focus of the Climate Change Adaptation Framework. But the enhanced LCCAP that we made is much broader with a bigger scope. The CCAF was a big factor in developing our LCCAP, it was somewhat easier to develop the LCCAP because of the CCAF. “ – Engr. Fernando Lopez, Disaster Risk Reduction Officer, Coron, Palawan