PROACTIVENESS that prepares for extreme-weather effects, as opposed to reactionary responses that are just designed to cope with emergency situations, was the main theme in the Stormwater Summit held on July 21. Leaders from the private and public sectors alike showed technologies that can recycle rainwater as well as infrastructure that can mitigate flooding in the most affected areas. One critical component that should not be overlooked is the way people tell stories about climate change, their responses to it and the way they will continually address environmental disasters, especially in urban areas.
Acceptance of the supposedly inevitable should not be automatically regarded as the vaunted so-called Filipino resilience; patience and endurance, while laudable, should not be used as excuses in the failure to come up with actual solutions that have long-term impact. This was the position of actor, host and TV producer Jose Sixto “Dingdong” Dantes, who spoke in the forum in his capacity as ambassador of the Office of Civil Defense (OCD).
As he pointed out, the stories that we as a country and community tell ourselves “shape behavior and how people think, feel, and eventually act. The stories we repeat and tell ourselves eventually become reality.”
Panatag Pilipinas, the OCD’s nationwide campaign, builds on the resilience that has been observed to be a part of the Filipino psyche. Its initiative is to train people to build habits, form disciplines and be strategic in their decision-making long before the adversity arrives. Launched a few years ago, among Panatag Pilipinas’ resources are “educational bite-sized videos to make disaster preparedness simple. You want disaster information to be practical and accessible to every Filipino,” Dantes said. “The goal has never been to frighten people about disasters.”
According to the Philippine Information Agency website, Panatag Pilipinas’ other projects include assembling disaster emergency kits, barangay-led drills and early warning systems. They are designed to make disaster preparedness available at the grassroots level and implemented in partnership with the local government units and the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
Preparation before the crisis
Belonging to a family that had members serve in the military, Dantes himself enlisted as a reservist in the Philippine Armed Forces. He named one of the lessons he learned from that organization: “Nobody trains while the emergency is already unfolding. Preparation always happens even before the mission begins. It is built through training, discipline, readiness — and these are not things we develop in the middle of a crisis.”
Late last year, he became part of an investigative journalism documentary, “Broken Roads, Broken Promises,” that tackled multibillion-peso flood control anomalies that led to the devastation of communities. As he journeyed with the team throughout the country, he met a 75-year-old Bulacan resident, “Nanay Evelyn,” who lived alone in a home that was partially but permanently submerged in water. He said, “She was used to sleeping on the second floor. Every single day, she would climb into her small boat just to buy food, drinking water and the basic necessities that she needed.”
At that point, Dantes realized that “what we saw was so difficult to comprehend. It wasn’t the flood that broke my heart. It was the realization that Nanay Evelyn was used to rowing every day.”
Later on, he kept asking himself as to why many Filipinos had become “so accustomed to the consequences [of climate change] that we began accepting them as normal. How did we become comfortable in saying, ‘This is how it really is’ — when perhaps it does not have to be.”
On the other hand, he has also encountered a different kind of story, like a Bohol community that worked together to prevent themselves from being swamped by high tides after an earthquake. The people raised their homes’ infrastructure, restored the nearby mangrove forest and improved their infrastructure to block off any rising water. Dantes described what he learned in that experience: “No single person solved the problem. No single project changed everything. It was a collective effort of an entire community.”
He described one of the messages that he emphasizes during his trips to various communities: “People who choose to care, participate, lead and prepare are people who refuse to let adversity write the ending of them. And perhaps that is the story we are all being invited to write nowadays.”
