Legarda pushes nature-based flood solutions at 5th INREM Conference

Senator Loren Legarda called for a nationwide shift toward nature-based flood control and ecosystem governance during her keynote address at the 5th International Conference on Integrated Natural Resources and Environment Management (INREM), held from 18 to 20 November 2025 at the Acacia Hotel, Alabang, Muntinlupa City.

Speaking before scientists, policymakers, and resilience advocates, Legarda warned that “climate change is the governance challenge of our generation,” citing the Philippines’ record of 43 million disaster displacements from 2014 to 2023.

“The Philippines faces about 20 cyclones each year, with 8 to 9 making landfall,” she said. “Just recently, Typhoon Tino claimed 250 lives and affected over five million Filipinos. Typhoon Uwan followed, killing 26 and affecting 6.9 million more.”

Legarda, a long-time advocate of environmental protection and climate action, condemned the failures of infrastructure and governance, stating, “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.”

She cited the DENR-WRMO satellite audit of over 4,000 flood-control projects from 2021 to 2023, revealing that “42 percent were problematic—poorly located, redundant, or unconstructed, and nearly 30 percent obstructed natural river flow or diverted floodwaters toward communities.” Legarda added, “DPWH confirmed that none of these structures had an Environmental Compliance Certificate.”

“Concrete cannot protect us when it is weakened by corruption, compromised by flawed clearances, or missing altogether as ghost projects,” Legarda said. “If we rebuild the same mistakes, we will relive the same tragedies.”

The four-term senator emphasized that the INREM approach integrates ecosystems as interconnected systems and not isolated sectors. “Nature functions as one system—clear the forests and lowlands drown; straighten rivers and cities flood; destroy mangroves and storm surges intensify,” Legarda said.

“Typhoons and floods follow nature, not bureaucracy,” she said. “Until our institutions act as one, every storm will expose the cost of our division.”

Legarda outlined proven nature-based solutions applicable to the Philippines, “We must restore degraded forests with native species, plant bamboo and vetiver along riverbanks. We must reconnect natural floodplains, restore wetlands, use eco-engineered embankments—gabions, coconets, vetiver.” She called for urban reforms including “detention basins and cisterns, sponge roads, permeable pavements, bioswales, rain gardens, and expanded urban tree cover.”

Legarda further cited legislative reforms aligned with INREM principles, including the Philippine Ecosystem and Natural Capital Accounting System (PENCAS) Act, and proposed measures like the Blue Economy Bill, the Low Carbon Economy Bill, the Circular Economy Promotion Bill, the Plastic Tax Bill, the National Coastal Greenbelt Bill, and the Clean Gateway Cities Bill.

“This is a legislative blueprint rooted in watershed logic, not political line,” Legarda said. “It answers the very failures this speech laid bare: the negligence, fragmentation, and concrete-first thinking that have left our communities vulnerable.”

Closing her address, Legarda offered a vision of ecological resilience: “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.”

The conference was organized by the University of the Philippines Los Baños, the College of Forestry and Natural Resources, and the UPLB Interdisciplinary Studies Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Environment Management. (30)