Keynote Speech of Senator Loren Legarda | Beyond Concrete: Institutionalizing Nature-Based Solutions for Resilience and Sustainability | 5th International Conference on INREM | 18 November 2025

Distinguished guests, policymakers, scientists, and partners in resilience—good morning.

Let me begin with the global context—familiar to us, but impossible to ignore. Global temperatures have already risen by about 1.412°C above the pre-industrial baseline, and the long-term global average is projected to exceed 1.5°C in the early 2030s unless emissions fall rapidly. What happens globally is felt here with even greater force. The Philippines faces about 20 cyclones each year, with 8 to 9 making landfall, and as the world’s most climate-vulnerable country for three consecutive years, it has recorded 43 million disaster displacements from 2014 to 2023.

Just recently, typhoon Tino claimed 250 lives and affected over five million Filipinos; Region 7 suffered 138 deaths, and the Negros Island Region lost 100. These came barely two months after a 6.9-magnitude quake in the same area claimed 79 lives. In the aftermath of Typhoon Tino, Typhoon Uwan followed, killing 26 and affecting 6.9 million more.

These losses are part of a larger pattern: climate change is the governance challenge of our generation, magnifying every natural disaster we face. And when each storm tests the integrity of our decisions, we cannot call these acts of God if negligence is built into our blueprints.

Negligence is blindness by choice—seeing the warnings and doing nothing. It becomes gross negligence when duty is abandoned for convenience, and apathy replaces accountability. When duty is bent for personal gain, when power meant for service is used against the weak and the vulnerable, it is no longer negligence—it is betrayal. We see this betrayal in unchecked mining and reclamation, deforestation and illegal logging, unrestrained sprawl into no-build zones, disregard of multi-hazard maps, and poor waste management.

Nowhere is this betrayal more evident than in how we confront floods — building higher walls, longer dikes, and deeper drains, even as every typhoon proves that concrete cannot protect us when it is weakened by corruption, compromised by flawed clearances, or missing altogether as ghost projects. If we rebuild the same mistakes, we will relive the same tragedies. As such, today’s conference zeroes in on a different mindset—one we have long articulated, but whose urgency has never been clearer than now.

The Integrated Natural Resources and Environment Management approach reminds us that nature functions as one system—clear the forests and lowlands drown; straighten rivers and cities flood; destroy mangroves and storm surges intensify. Yet our governance still handles these interconnected systems in silos—forests under DENR, rivers under DPWH, water under NWRB, and flood control under district engineers—resulting in duplication, waste, and greater risk. Typhoons and floods follow nature, not bureaucracy. Until our institutions act as one, every storm will expose the cost of our division.

This reality was made evident by the recent DENR-WRMO satellite audit of over 4,000 flood-control projects from 2021 to 2023. The audit found that 42 percent were problematic—poorly located, redundant, or unconstructed—and nearly 30 percent of obstructed natural river flow or diverted floodwaters toward communities. Most alarming, DPWH confirmed that none of these structures had an Environmental Compliance Certificate, leading to misaligned projects that worsened flooding.

The UP Resilience Institute is precise: flood control works only when ecosystems are allowed to function. Nature-based solutions succeed because they restore natural hydrology that concrete cannot replicate. This is the essence of Integrated Natural Resources and Environment Management — recognizing that landscapes are one system, from ridge to reef and river to coast.

Let me outline the specific nature-based and integrated solutions that work — already proven around the world, and fully applicable to the Philippines.

Upstream is where real flood protection begins. We must restore degraded forests with native species, plant bamboo and vetiver along riverbanks to anchor soil, and use catchment ponds, contour farming, and agroforestry to slow runoff and reduce sediment. Above all, remaining forests must be shielded from illegal logging, irresponsible mining, and unchecked development. When watersheds fail, every community downstream pays the price.

All these must be guided by updated multi-hazard maps, so that reforestation, land use decisions, and community protections align with actual risk. Meanwhile, our rivers flood not only from heavy rain but because we have taken away the space they need to function. We must reconnect natural floodplains, restore wetlands that act as sponges, and rebuild riparian buffers that stabilize banks and filter runoff. Eco-engineered embankments — gabions, coconets, vetiver — offer flexible, safer alternatives to rigid concrete walls. We must also stop converting riverbanks into commercial or residential zones, and use small flow-through dams upstream to slow tributary surges. These measures reduce peak flows far more effectively than isolated dikes ever could.

In our cities, flooding has become the norm because we have paved over the very ground that should be absorbing water. Urban resilience begins by making our cities permeable again. Detention basins and cisterns — even beneath parks and basketball courts — can hold excess water, while retention parks double as green open space and
temporary reservoirs. Rainwater harvesting, sponge roads, permeable pavements, grass pavers, bioswales, rain gardens, and expanded urban tree cover all help water infiltrate instead of overwhelming our streets. But none of this works if drains are clogged; solid waste management must be strengthened, and silted channels must be dredged responsibly where needed. These are cost-efficient solutions that
work with water, not against it.

Along our coasts, nature provides our strongest and most affordable defenses. Restored mangroves can cut storm surges by more than half, while rehabilitated seagrass beds and coastal wetlands stabilize shorelines and prevent erosion. Even planting native beach vegetation create natural barriers that absorb wave energy before it reaches our communities.

Finally, restoration must be matched by reform. This is why our legislative agenda is
designed to embed INREM thinking and nature-based solutions at every scale. At the core of these efforts is the Philippine Ecosystem and Natural Capital Accounting System (PENCAS) Act, which now embeds ecosystem values into national and local planning and formally recognizes them as part of our national wealth. Building on PENCAS, our legislative agenda strengthens nature-based and integrated flood management across all landscapes:

The Blue Economy Bill shifts marine development away from extraction-driven, fragmented, and environmentally harmful practices toward a coordinated, science-based, and sustainable approach. The Low Carbon Economy Bill, which accelerates decarbonization to temper the long-term intensification of typhoons.

The Circular Economy Promotion Bill and Plastic Tax Bill aim to reduce waste at the source and fund cleanup, preventing plastics from clogging esteros, canals, and rivers. The National Coastal Greenbelt Bill that restores mangroves and beach forests as living coastal shields.

The Sustainable Cities and Communities Bill and Clean Gateway Cities Bill, which together curb paved-over sprawl, enhance water retention, and keep drainage systems clear through integrated planning and a mandated Cleanliness Audit system. This is a legislative blueprint rooted in watershed logic, not political line. It answers the very failures this speech laid bare: the negligence, fragmentation, and concrete-first thinking that have left our communities vulnerable.

When nature-based solutions, INREM integration, and strong policy move in one direction, a clear vision emerges—one that restores the systems we damaged and turns them into our strongest defenses.

A Philippines where flood control begins with forests, where safety is grown over decades rather than rushed in crisis, where we do not fight water but accommodate it, absorb it, and work with it. This is the future we can build together.

Maraming salamat at isang luntiang Pilipinas sa ating lahat.