[OPINION] We don’t have enough in the national budget for climate solutions

Climate finance is not just about quantity; it is also about the quality. In the case of the Philippines’ domestic public finance, it is lacking both. The 2026 national climate budget, or the part of the annual general appropriations tagged to be aligned with national climate objectives, was formally set at P648.7 billion. This seems like a massive decline from 2025’s funding set at P1.15 trillion — except too much of it was tagged for flood control projects that turned out to be corrupted. Yet this figure comprises only 9.6% of the overall 2026 national budget, much lower than 18.2% from the year before. This is an indicator that the climate agenda, once declared as a priority at the start of the current administration, has decreased in importance — an unfortunate casualty of corruption. What is more startling is that the P648.7-billion number is actually overestimated. Greener gray? The biggest reason for this is because 71% of the national climate budget was allotted to thousands of infrastructure projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). Despite being unseen in climate-focused policy consultations and forums, the agency has received by far the biggest slice of public climate finance in the Philippines in the past six years. More than P340 billion of DPWH’s climate budget is allotted for either the construction of new roads, bridges, and ports or retrofitting existing ones to become more climate-resilient. More than P90 billion is for constructing buildings designed to withstand climate change impacts. However, it is unlikely that all of its infrastructure projects have fully integrated climate-related considerations. While updates in recent years now require including into infrastructure designs the potential impacts of floods, landslides, and other hazards, these are largely based on historical data, not projected temperature or rainfall changes that are crucial to ensuring structural stability. There is also a lack of standardized use low-carbon cement and other construction materials for building roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. Yet these considerations are not fully reflected under the system for tagging government-led actions as climate-aligned, currently known as Climate Change Expenditure Tagging (CCET). For example, under current guidelines, the DPWH can climate-tag an entire P50-million road project as aligned with adaptation. Yet the road would still have been built anyway because it is a basic infrastructure need; this makes it unlikely that the entire P50-million value is truly contributing to adaptation. This likely applies to most of over 9,000 road and bridge projects, 5,000 building projects, and 1,100 covered courts and gymnasiums that are climate-tagged for 2026. Many of the hundreds of tagged local flood control projects are actually focused on enhancing drainages to mitigate floods instead of the larger-scale infrastructure usually associated with the term. How much? With this context, the declared national climate budget for 2026 is actually lower than P648.7 billion. Yet, without the DPWH conducting a comprehensive study on how many of its infrastructure projects fully integrate climate-related factors, it is difficult to have a clear estimate of how much public climate finance the Philippines truly has. Notwithstanding the usual issues of corruption and inefficiency in governance, insufficient allocations from the national budget for climate solutions only add to the challenges that the country must navigate through the increasingly-difficult climate finance landscape. First, it makes implementing its upcoming Nationally Determined Contribution an uphill battle. This is considering that this pledge for mitigating emissions is expected to have a higher unconditional target compared to the country’s first commitment, which only has had less than one percent of its P4-trillion requirement mobilized about halfway through this decade. Second, it makes the government keep relying on loans — that comprise a vast majority of the Philippines’ climate-related Official Development Assistance portfolio — to fill in the finance gap. This only adds to both the country’s increasing national debt and the burden unjustly shouldered by Filipinos. Third, it puts millions of Filipinos at risk to climate extremes, especially in a stretch of expected “super” disasters. Droughts have hit many provinces this year — months before the onset of the peak of Super El Niño. It is expected towards the end of the year, when super-typhoons and storms in rapid succession have also hit the country in recent years. Heading into 2027 As the Philippine legislature deliberates on the 2027 national budget, the climate agenda must be re-established as a genuine priority. This would only be translated through an increase in the national climate budget — in both quantity and quality. The recently-published 2027 National Expenditures Program (NEP) indicates we are not headed in the right direction. If adopted, the share of climate action in the overall budget would be higher by 0.07%, which is not enough, especially with near-term climate extremes heading our way. For another example, the budget tagged under the National Climate Change Action Plan’s thematic area of “ecosystem and environmental stability” includes most of nature-based solutions (NbS), such as reforestation, protection of mangroves, wetlands, and other ecosystems. In 2026, the funding for these solutions was only P8.2 billion — or 28 times less than that for new road and bridge projects. Under the 2027 NEP, this budget would be slashed to P2.8 billion. This is amidst public clamor for more NbS, and just a few weeks after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources issued an administrative order that would further enable NbS in the country. Reforms to the CCET must be implemented to enable an accurate presentation of the annual budget for climate action. This includes building agency capacities and capabilities in climate-tagging, aligning CCET categories to be more aligned with recent updates in national climate plans, and involving non-government stakeholders more in monitoring and tracking public spending. NbS must also be assessed fairly with gray infrastructure projects and prioritized in all situations where they are the most cost-effective and ecologically-suitable option. If money makes the climate world go around, the Philippines needs to use what it has to avoid staying the course of “business-as-usual.” So far, the government still has not learned the right lessons. – Rappler.com John Leo Algo is the national coordinator of Aksyon Klima Pilipinas.