The cry of Loren Legarda

Senator Loren Legarda

The cry of Loren Legarda

By Gerry Lirio – TheNATIONWEEK.com | May 11, 2026

“WE have become experts in counting the dead and repairing the broken, but we have not yet mastered the art of anticipating the blow.”

That was Senator Loren Legarda, in a speech at the last Asian Conference on Climate Change and Disaster Resilience late last month, impressing upon various government agencies, including the local government units, and other stakeholders that providing relief goods, rebuilding new infrastructures were not enough disaster response.

Worst of all, the country should not get accustomed to counting bodies, she said.

“I propose that we move toward a model of ‘Conditional Early Action,’ she said in the speech at the Fuller Hall of the Asian Institute of Management in Makati City.

It was probably her 100^th speech more or less since she became a senator trying to grab public attention in the fight to address climate change, which over the past many years she has begun to call climate crisis.

Funds not just for coffins

Post disaster response is not enough, she said. Preparation to survive the disaster is a must.

“This means pre-positioning funds in the accounts of local governments—not for rebuilding Schools (after a disaster), but for retrofitting them (before a disaster); not for buying coffins, but for buying early warning systems and portable food reserves,” she said.

Why? “Because the most cost-effective decision is often the earliest one, the choice to build right before the risk fully materializes.”

Legarda’s speech came appropriately as it was delivered in front of country’s first responders, the LGU officials, and some global and finance experts willing to fund the disaster response in a country where funding for climate change preparedness is as crucial as the disaster response itself.

It was the second time that Legarda had addressed the Asian conference on climate change and disaster resilience. The first one was three years ago.

Back then, she talked about an “existential threat,” of how the era of global warming had given way to an era of “global boiling,” as UN Secretary-General António Guterres had called it.

“Rising sea levels, intensifying typhoons, longer droughts, and the specter of widespread agricultural collapse,” she said.

Not thinking or not funding “disaster anticipation’ thus is a disservice to the people, she said.

“National policies exist,” she said.

“But by the time the bureaucracy catches up to the reality on the ground, the window to prevent loss has closed. We have become experts in counting the dead and repairing the broken, but we have not yet mastered the art of anticipating the blow.”

Anyone who has seen her work about climate change would feel her cry, her pain, and fears.

“A typhoon hits. A river swells,” A community is washed away. We see the images on our screens,

we are moved enough to mobilize hot kitchens, community pantries, relief and rescue, and then… we wait for the next disaster. We rebuilt. But too often, we rebuild into the same risks. This is the status quo.”

Across the Asia-Pacific, from the Mekong Delta to the Pacific Islands, Legarda said in her speech that the world has been witnessing a convergence of risks– climate volatility, economic exposure and uneven fiscal capacity over the years.

“What differs is not the nature of the threat but the ability to anticipate and absorb it,” she said.

“For decades, we have operated within a cycle of trauma and repair.”

Flood budget scandal

Only last year, the Philippines suffered a great deal when, at the height of the wet season, floods flowed like no other in key urban centers, as if rains and floods were not expected at all.

In the Philippines, when it rains, it floods. That is as sure as the sun rises and sets each day. It was a great disappointment when Philippine officials expressed surprise when the floods came.

Year after year, especially when the rains start coming-and coming stronger each year–the country suffers one disaster after another, most of them of biblical proportions.

Over time, the rains and the subsequent floods took a destructive toll on property, lives, and livelihood in the country.

In his 2024 State of the Nation address, President Marcos Jr.’s boasted that his administration had completed some 5,500 flood control projects around the country, but when rains poured a week later, the country’s key urban and rural centers were submerged in horrendous, unparalleled floods, effectively exposing budget anomalies in his administration.

Ghost projects

Executives and lawmakers had earmarked billions of pesos for these flood-control projects in the 2004 and 2005 General Appropriations Act, but thanks or no thanks to the horrendous floods, it exposed the country’s worst budget scandal to date.

It turned out that the flood control projects funded in billions were either substandard, unfinished, or non-existing, and that the billions of funds were allegedly pocketed by certain lawmakers and LGU officials.

Where have all the funds gone? President Marcos supposedly exposed it first, but why did it happen? And who’s behind the multi-billion-peso fraud has remained unsolved.

Legarda didn’t talk about details of the corruption, but she did talk about it elsewhere. But in her AIM speech she instead spoke at length about dealing with a disaster ahead of time–with confidence, with a manageable level of certainty and survival.

Senior journo, rookie lawmaker

Legarda was only 38 years old when she first joined the Senate in 1998. But while she was an accomplished broadcast journalist, she was a legislative neophyte and, at that time, not enough people were paying attention to climate change.

She remembered well enough the time when her senior colleagues at the Senate regarded her advocacy with amusement. “Oh my, do we really have to pass laws about waste segregation, about the single use of plastic?” she quoted one of them as saying. Senior lawmakers found these things too mundane, if not cheap, for them to care about. She had tackled some of these issues in her TV programs at ABS-CBN, and she took these seriously.

“This disconnect is critical,” she said. “It is the space where dreams are shattered and lives are lost. For decades, we have operated within a cycle of trauma and repair.”

Great body of work

Legarda has since authored dozens and dozens of pieces of legislation, including the creation of the Climate Change Commission, the country’s sole policy-making body dedicated to coordinating, monitoring, and evaluating government programs on climate change. The commission leads in developing science-based adaptation and mitigation policies to build community resilience.

Things dramatically changed when the destructive Typhoon Ondoy flooded Metro Manila and nearby provinces in September 2009 and Typhoon Yolanda flattened Tacloban and nearby provinces in November 2013.

Yolanda killed thousands of people, but the government stopped counting at 6,000.

Indeed, the destruction was of biblical proportions.

Between 2009 and 2020, economic and human losses and damages in ASEAN countries were placed at $97.3 billion.

A journo’s visuals

In her speech, the former TV broadcaster coupled her speech with photos and footages of different disasters that hit the country to illustrate her point,

Indeed, preventing the loss of lives and saving more infrastructures needed more careful attention among public and private leaders in dealing with the climate crisis, which over the years has become a vicious cycle, not unlike a cat and mouse chase.

“It reflects not only a failure of policy and imagination but a deeper structural misalignment between how risk unfolds in real-time and how finance is released in response,” she said.

Dry spell coming

This year, weathermen have predicted the onset of a great dry season, less rains, but powerful typhoons.

Legarda said the country had better be prepared. She once rued that she was only a senator in an interview with this newsman many years ago. She can influence policy, she said, but disaster response belonged to the executive departments.

She told the finance experts and environment experts and the LGU officials that she was willing to learn from them to pass more laws to address and anticipate disaster response.

As a Philippine legislator for over two decades, Legarda said she envisioned this kind of life for the millions of Filipinos in this climate-vulnerable country, a vision that she had wanted to become a reality through the laws she passed and funding allocations she made.

Relief vs readiness “We must tear down the firewall between relief and readiness,” she said.

“Our national budget has long treated climate finance as a post-mortem expense. We allocate billions for after, but pennies for just before. We need to activate resources for anticipatory Use,” she said.

“Not because the Philippines lacks resources but because we release those resources too late. Therefore, this is my challenge to you, and my promise to our people: We must legislate for anticipation,” she said.

Telling it like it is

But she was blunt to LGU leaders.

“Do not wait for a memorandum or a declaration of climate emergency,” she said.

“If your Annual Investment Plans do not assume extreme climate events and economic shocks, revise.

“If your infrastructure plans assume that things will always be normal, pivot to nature-based solutions as soon as possible.

She was as blunt when she addressed officials of the Asian Development, the World Bank and the Department of Finance.

“Resilience is also financial,” she said.

Fleeing the floods

“Fiscal policy is meaningless if it does not reach the mother packing her children into a tricycle to flee a flooding home,” she said.

Anticipatory finance must be redesigned to reach them first and not last, she said.

“Give families the liquidity to evacuate early, to buy their own emergency kits, to store their own rice, and survive unscathed and with dignity.”

If climate change funders were serious about resilience, Legarda said financing, both the loans and the national budget, must stop restoring risk and finally start reducing it.

“It is about liquidity. It is about the speed of the peso moving from the national treasury to a local barangay before the storm makes landfall.

Act fast, act now

“Anticipatory finance, Legarda said, is more than just acting early; it is about making the right investments early so that risk is reduced at the point of design and not after failure.

Central banks, regulators, and development finance institutions mustn’t treat anticipatory action as a social expenditure, she said.

“It is an exercise in risk management; it protects macroeconomic stability, reduces financial shocks, safeguards long-term growth, and is a step towards genuine climate justice,” she said,

“As we speak of systems, finance, and infrastructure, we must also speak of the hands that will build them. We are not just investing in grids and sea walls; we are investing in a generation that refuses to accept the status quo of vulnerability,” she said.

Legarda said the world was nearing the point of no return.

Working together

In the face of the climate crisis, she said lawmakers, the LGU leaders, and the foreign financiers should view and understand the challenges from individual and collective lenses, with the sum considered greater than its parts.

“In truth, we are all experiencing the same storm within the same ocean. But we are onboard very different ships,”

“We all need to work together for the climate; to secure the lives, livelihoods, and the future of humankind,” she added.