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Sam Beltran

The tarpaulin barely held against the wind, sagging under days of ceaseless rain.
For the earthquake survivors of San Remigio, in the central Philippines, it was all that remained – a thin sheet of plastic above a patch of mud, standing in for the homes a 6.9-magnitude quake had reduced to rubble weeks earlier.
Then, in early November, Typhoon Kalmaegi barrelled through.
The storm, known locally as Tino, drenched thousands of families still huddled in their makeshift shelters. Roads vanished beneath floodwater. Power lines snapped and stayed down. Aid was stranded on the wrong side of washed-out highways. For many, hope felt as precarious as the tarpaulin pinned above their heads.

“One piece of tarpaulin the size of a plywood sheet for a whole family, that was all they had,” said Mayfourth Luneta, deputy executive director of the Center for Disaster Preparedness. “If you have five family members, you’re basically just standing under it.”
Luneta had flown from Manila to central Cebu province after the quake, only to find herself trapped in the chaos of a second disaster. Kalmaegi struck just as her team was due to deliver relief. The main highway out of Mandaue City turned into a river.
“People were shocked because that area doesn’t usually flood like that, not to the extent we were hearing about,” she said.
When her team finally found a way through, they discovered communities pushed past the point of desperation. Some had been without electricity for weeks. Others lined the sides of roads, begging for help. “Everywhere we went, they kept saying, ‘Thank you so much! We’ve been without electricity for so long!’”
We’re seeing three typhoons ravage the country in a week
Mayfourth Luneta, Filipino aid worker
For aid workers like Luneta, what is unfolding in the Philippines no longer feels like a series of isolated emergencies. It feels like a punishing new normal.
“We used to see one or two strong typhoons a year. Now it feels like three in a week,” she said.
This convergence of back-to-back storms, worsening floods and overlapping disasters offers a stark preview of life on the front lines of global warming, scientists say. Disasters that once seemed rare and extraordinary now crash into one another, erasing the space between recovery and the next emergency.
For communities already struggling with poverty, weak infrastructure and systemic corruption, each shock piles onto the last, creating the sense of a seemingly endless cycle of emergencies.

In Marikina City, which endures serious flooding almost every year, Philippine Red Cross administrator Jennifer de Guzman is accustomed to the grim routine of disaster response.
“But the situation in Cebu during Typhoon Tino felt different,” said the aid worker who joined a 10-day relief operation after the storm had hit.
“Even though we were familiar with the rhythm of emergency operations, the sheer scale of the destruction in Cebu demanded more from us: more coordination, more manpower, more time.”
The damage spanned a wide area, forcing a bigger, more agile response. In Marikina, years of repeated floods have bred local know-how and hard-won resilience, but Cebu showed how even seasoned responders can become overwhelmed when multiple overlapping disasters arrive all at once.


Super typhoons such as Haiyan in 2013, one of the most destructive tropical cyclones ever recorded, were once treated as once-in-a-generation calamities.
“But now, we’re seeing three typhoons ravage the country in a week,” Luneta said. “We have been feeling the worsening effects of climate change on disasters in the Philippines first hand.”
“It wasn’t this severe before … From the neglect we’ve shown in the destruction of the environment, we are now harvesting this in heaps of disasters,” she told This Week in Asia.
Clusters of cyclones
Scientists and front‑line responders warn that climate change is dramatically altering the types, frequency and severity of disasters hitting the Philippines.
Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross, said the changes were now unmistakable. “There has been a notable increase in both the frequency and intensity of these tropical cyclones,” she told This Week in Asia.
Last year, the Southeast Asian nation saw a rare cluster of six cyclones hit in less than five weeks. This year, two super typhoons struck within days of each other.
And typhoons are only part of the story. Regions that were once protected from major flooding are now being hit by heavy monsoon rains and unexpected storms, putting extra pressure on relief teams.

Pang said the country’s geography of scattered islands made relief work all the more difficult, so agencies were now focusing on preparing for disasters before they happened.
The Philippines has weathered a succession of powerful typhoons in recent years, including Bopha in 2012, Haiyan in 2013 and Rai in 2021.
New climate studies are beginning to quantify what communities have long sensed. Researchers at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute have found that climate change intensified the destructive power of Kalmaegi and Fung‑wong – typhoons known locally as Tino and Uwan that struck within days of each other last month, killing more than 250 people.
Human-induced climate change had increased both wind speeds and rainfall, making storms of this magnitude “more frequent, dangerous and costly because of the continued use of fossil fuels”, said institute director Ralf Toumi.
Lessons from Japan
The Philippines sits squarely in the Pacific Typhoon Belt and the West Pacific Cyclone Basin, two of the world’s most disaster-prone zones where extreme weather is common.
Japan faces similar dangers from storms and earthquakes, but has been able to lower its risk through better planning and preparedness. The Philippines ranks as the country with the highest disaster risk globally, while Japan is ranked 17th, according to the 2025 World Risk Index published by Germany’s Development Aid Alliance and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict.
“This shows that risk is not the same as hazard. Risk must be managed,” said geologist Mahar Lagmay, a professor at the University of the Philippines.

“If you can manage the exposure of people and communities, control development and strengthen the capacities of the population, you can lower the risk.”
“Japan is far more effective at this,” he added, citing the East Asian nation’s advanced planning, ample resources and proven ability to minimise risks despite also facing severe hazards, including snow-related dangers.
“Japan’s greater resources allow it to reduce vulnerability,” Lagmay said. “The Philippines, by contrast, has far less capacity.”
Despite living with typhoons, floods and earthquakes as a matter of course, the Philippines is still ill prepared for the scale of devastation now routinely unfolding, experts say.
We are trapped in a cycle of merely preparing, but we can no longer truly defend ourselves
Ven Paolo Valenzuela, Filipino researcher
“We are trapped in a cycle of merely preparing, but we can no longer truly defend ourselves against disasters,” said Ven Paolo Valenzuela, a Filipino research fellow at Singapore Management University who specialises in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
“It’s as if we’re just waiting to get punched and we were never taught how to dodge.”
For Valenzuela, the clearest example of this gap is the country’s inability to pass a national land-use law – a basic framework for deciding where people should live, where businesses and infrastructure can safely be built, and which areas are simply too dangerous for permanent settlement.
“Land-use classification is absolutely critical for a risk-informed development pathway,” he said. “Which areas are exposed to natural hazards? Which are safe? Which areas should have residents because they are safe, and which can we afford to develop with some calculated risk?”

Without such a framework, even the best disaster-risk data could not meaningfully shape how cities expanded or where roads, bridges and industrial zones were sited, Valenzuela added.
Since Haiyan struck in 2013, the Philippines has made progress in sharing hazard information and raising public awareness. But much of the scientific knowledge is still seen as academic research rather than being used in everyday planning and decision-making.
One of the most ambitious efforts was Project Noah, short for Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazard, which was launched in 2012 to provide detailed, real-time hazard maps and warnings for evacuations and rescue efforts.
Noah combined global science and advanced technology such as Lidar 3D scanning to map risks, model floods and identify danger zones. Scientists credit it with helping to cut the Philippines’ weather-related deaths by almost two-thirds between 2014 and 2024.

But Noah was shut down in 2017 due to funding cuts, moving to the University of the Philippines in a much reduced role, focusing on helping local governments make science-based plans.
The loss of national-scale innovation, especially the Lidar programme, was deeply felt – had it continued, the country could have mapped far more, built stronger disaster resilience and potentially saved more lives, said Lagmay, who was the project director.
“We could have done so much more … we could have probably saved more lives,” he said. “We could have built an army of disaster researchers. We could have inspired more. We could have used more technologies.”
Billions washed away
Compounding the Philippines’ vulnerabilities is a problem that predates climate change but now magnifies its toll: corruption.
A widening flood-control corruption scandal has seen numerous lawmakers and local officials accused of colluding with contractors to build substandard, overpriced or outright non‑existent “ghost” projects, including infrastructure meant to protect communities from the very storms that are now arriving with growing ferocity.
Since 2022, the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr has disbursed a total of 545 billion pesos (US$9.2 billion) for flood-control projects. Yet Metro Manila and nearby areas still spent days submerged under deep, foul-smelling floodwaters following torrential rains this year.
Valenzuela traced the rot back decades, pointing to corruption in flood-control and related infrastructure in the 1990s and 2000s, when weak dykes were built after the deadly eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.

“What makes it worse now is that climate change is delivering more intense hazards every year,” he said. “For every peso stolen, the equivalent cost is hundreds or thousands more in disaster damage, lost lives and lost futures.”
For Luneta, the effect is painfully visible on the ground, where responders are forced to stretch limited relief across an ever denser calendar of emergencies.
“We’re all fighting for meagre resources,” she said, adding that people had started to connect “the corruption issues … to the devastation they experience each year.”
Valenzuela drew a stark contrast between the Philippines and its regional peers. He slammed the country’s flood control projects as patchwork efforts that failed to match the level of risk they were supposed to manage.
He urged Philippine officials to look to neighbours such as Taiwan, Japan and Singapore, which treat disaster‑prevention works as core development infrastructure, not optional add‑ons.
“When they invest properly in coastal defences and flood control, even a strong typhoon becomes just another rainy day,” he said.
“Because our infrastructure keeps failing us … We are left to fend for ourselves and prepare on our own every single time.”


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The Philippines

Why the Philippines can’t escape its endless cycle of disaster

Satellite imagery shows Super Typhoon Fung-wong as it approaches the Philippines on November 9. Photo: NOAA/EPA

Satellite imagery taken by the US’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows Super Typhoon Fung-wong approaching the Philippines on November 9. Photo: NOAA/NESDIS/AFP

People shelter under makeshift tents amid the remains of homes swept away by floods brought on by Typhoon Kalmaegi in Cebu, the Philippines, on November 6. Photo: Reuters

A woman walks along a mud-covered street in Liloan, Cebu Province, in the aftermath of Typhoon Kalmaegi on November 6. Photo: AFP

Widespread flooding is seen in Cagayan province, northern Philippines, on November 11, after Typhoon Fung-wong. Photo: Cagayan Police Provincial Office/AP

Rescuers search for missing people in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture after a major 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the region in January 2024. Photo: Jiji Press/AFP

A man in Tacloban walks among the debris of destroyed houses in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013. Photo: AFP

A handout satellite image made available by the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Adminstration shows Typhoon Haiyan striking the Philippines on November 8, 2013. Photo: NOAA/EPA

Workers from the Philippine Department of Public Works and Highways open a clogged drainage canal in San Juan City, Metro Manila, to collect trash as part of flood control measures on Wednesday. Photo: EPA

Climate collapse: Southeast Asia’s new normal?

Illustration: Huy Truong

Stupas are seen in a flooded Buddhist temple in Ayutthaya province, central Thailand. Photo: AFP

An elderly woman traverses floodwaters in an Ayutthaya neighbourhood after heavy rains. Photo: AFP

A man rests on the roof of his submerged house on the banks of a flooded river in Ayutthaya province last month. Photo: Reuters

The world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases did not send heads of state to the Cop30 summit in Brazil. Photo: AP

Floodwaters inundate streets and buildings following heavy rains in Hoi An, Vietnam on October 30. Photo: AFP

A diver documents the extent of coral bleaching at a reef in Malaysia. Photo: Reef Check Malaysia

Rescuers pull an inflatable boat loaded with residents during a forced evacuation in Cagayan province, the Philippines, on November 11 following Super Typhoon Fung-wong. Photo:  AFP

Is fatigue derailing Philippines’ fight against flood control corruption scandal?

A protester holds a chain linked to an effigy of a crocodile, which represents corrupt officials, during anti-corruption rally along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA, in Quezon City on Sunday. Photo: AFP

Protesters take part in an anti-corruption rally along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA, in Quezon City, Metro Manila on Sunday. Police estimated that about 90,000 people joined rallies nationwide that day. Photo: AFP

Protesters destroy an effigy of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr during an anti-corruption rally near Malacanang Palace in Manila on Sunday. Photo: AFP

Filipinos raise placards during an anti-corruption protest at the People Power Monument in Quezon City on Sunday. The march there attracted about 7,000 people. Photo: Reuters

Philippine police are deployed behind barricades during an anti-corruption rally in Manila on Sunday. Rally organisers claim police disrupted preparations for the protests. Photo: EPA

8 arrested in Philippine flood control scandal, but will ‘big fish’ get away?

One of eight arrested Department of Public Works and Highways officers is escorted by police in Quezon City, Metro Manila, the Philippines, on Monday. Photo: EPA

One of eight arrested Department of Public Works and Highways officers is escorted by a police officer to the Sandiganbayan anti-corruption court in Quezon City, the Philippines, on Monday. Photo: EPA

Police escort the initial batch of arrested suspects as they arrive at the Sandiganbayan, a special anti-corruption court, in Quezon City, the Philippines, on Monday. Photo: AP

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr has urged those accused of being involved in the flood control corruption scandal to surrender. Photo: Malacanang Presidential Communications Office via AP

Rescuers carry a resident past cars washed away by floods at the height of Typhoon Kalmaegi at a subdivision of Cebu City on November 4. Photo: AFP

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Corruption, complacency and climate chaos conspire to turn the Philippines’ natural hazards into man-made tragedies


Corruption, complacency and climate chaos conspire to turn the Philippines’ natural hazards into man-made tragedies.


Why the Philippines can’t escape its endless cycle of disaster

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Corruption, complacency and climate chaos conspire to turn the Philippines’ natural hazards into man-made tragedies

Corruption, complacency and climate chaos conspire to turn the Philippines’ natural hazards into man-made tragedies