President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. envisions a resilient Philippines, noting the country’s “inherent” vulnerability to the impacts of climate change in his 2024 State of the Nation address, but his administration has yet to make significant strides in disaster-preparedness beyond brick-and-mortar solutions in the wake of typhoons supercharged by climate change.
Of the president’s SONA promises over the last three years, only two have been fulfilled while eight are in progress and eight are also stalled.
The government had included flood control projects in its list of “high-impact” infrastructure projects for 2023 and allotted a P185 billion budget for the Flood Management Program of the Department of Public Works and Highways.
Marcos vetoed P16.7 billion-worth of these projects in this year’s national budget. He had called for an investigation into the flood control program after a slew of typhoons battered the country from October to November 2024,
The Marcos administration is pushing to achieve a 40% mix of renewable energy sources in the country’s power grid by 2030, but the Philippines remains heavily reliant on fossil fuels, a major cause of climate change. About 62% of the total power generated in 2024 came from coal with only 22% sourced from renewable energy, based on DOE’s data.
Marcos signed into law Republic Act No. 12120 last January to develop and promote a “safe, efficient, and cost-effective” energy source by formalizing the country’s indigenous gas industry. This law provides tax and other incentives to producers of natural gas.
However, there is a lag in the development of renewable energy infrastructure, especially in the Visayas and Mindanao which saw major power outages resulting in billion-peso losses
in 2024. (Read SONA 2023 PROMISE TRACKER: ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT – VERA Files)
There are 387 awarded solar power projects in Luzon, 80 in Visayas and 50 in Mindanao, according to the DOE’s report last April.
On the international stage, however, the Philippines is on the forefront of the fight for climate responsibility and justice as Marcos noted in his SONA last year. That year, it won the bid to host the board of the Loss and Damage Fund, a $700-million fund to help developing countries recover from the onslaught of disasters exacerbated by climate change.
See Marcos’ track record on his other pledges on the energy and environment sectors:
