Hi! We are two interns (Amaraine and Jed) from York University. We’re currently in the last third of a three-month internship with the Canadian Urban Institute Philippines (CUI). The CUI Philippines is a non-profit organization that has three offices in the Philippines – we’re stationed in the Iloilo City office, in Iloilo Province in the Western Visayas Region (Central Philippines).

We are Masters of Environmental Studies students earning degrees in Urban Planning. Our job in Iloilo has been to help develop 7 training modules on topics that are important to the urban and regional development of the region: Local Governance Performance Management System, Local Economic Development, Tourism Management, GIS, Growth Management, Knowledge Management, and Disaster Risk Management.

In addition to the modules, our project manager requested give a lecture to journalism students on a topic that would eventually culminate in a writing contest. Last year’s talk was about ‘Writing About the Public Realm’. This year, we were asked to talk about ‘Writing about Climate Change’.

In order to prepare, we went to a tiny Buddhist monastery high in the mountains and fought vampires. We then decided that what might be of use to us (and the students) was to see if we could gauge what people, their readers, already knew about climate change. Armed with the question, ‘What do you know about climate change’ we went to a couple of the busiest areas we knew and began asking folks what they knew. Our coworker (and journalist extraordinaire), Nereo Lujan acted as a cameraman while we accosted well-meaning Ilonggos who were going about their days.

We showed the video we produced (rather, we conceived, but Nereo produced) at the end of an hour-long talk about climate change – it was intended as an example of how people could begin a dialogue about the issue: Climate Change in Iloilo

We’ve also included a link to the text of our presentation for those of you who are interested: Climate Change

Our thought processes around approaching this revolved primarily around the question of, ‘what DO people here know about climate change?’ We approached it not necessarily as any kind of authority on the topic, but as Canadians who have a different approach and a different sense of responsibility about climate change. What we realized is that for us, climate change isn’t a topic unto itself, rather it has informed everything that we have worked at as planning students, future planners and human beings. In answer to one question from the audience, we mentioned that for us, climate change is something that we think about as we wake up or brush our teeth – it is intrinsic in how we place ourselves in the world.

From there, we realized that while the Philippines isn’t a huge contributor to global warming and climate change, they will be profoundly affected by it. They therefore have a different perspective about climate change and their way of mitigating it. To a large degree, they are limited in their ability to mitigate their ‘footprint’ due in large part to the lack of awareness about climate change and the fact that the poverty here is so vast that it prevents any real ability to use alternative/expensive mitigating tools (see presentation). People here have instead wisely chosen to focus on coping with the effects of climate change without being fully aware of what climate change means. When it rains here (and it has, it’s the monsoon season), the flooding that occurs in some downtown areas isn’t just rainwater runoff, it’s seawater that is slowly spilling onto the land. Effects like these, while currently more annoying than terrifying, signal future devastation if sea-levels continue to rise. The Philippines is left cleaning up the mess without participating in its creation…

People here have been coping with the effects in isolation – without having a discourse on climate change as fundamental to processes like disaster risk management, there will be no comprehensive strategy developed. To be fair, neither of us knows of ANY country with a comprehensive strategy, but many have the fortune of not being drowned for lack of one.

This blog gives you a little glimpse into what we’ve been up to. If you want to know more, we’ve both been keeping thoughtful and heartbreaking/sidesplitting blogs while we’ve been here. They are:

Jed’s Blog

Amaraine’s Blog

Thanks for checking in!

Jed and Amaraine

Category: On location, Philippines // Add Comment »