Philippine Economic Society (PES)
Conclusion
Last week, the link between the economy and ecology was explored as premise to answering the question of how the Philippines must rethink its development strategies. After all, adaptation and mitigation to climate change is most urgent in a country directly facing the Pacific. However, equally valid is the country’s desire to adapt new technologies already available abroad as part of its growth agenda. It is also hopeful that the Filipino people are concerned about potential labor displacement with industry 4.0. The question that remains is whether these new technologies set to be adopted all over the world support sustainable development and would not further aggravate the situation of those populations already vulnerable to climate change.
Dilemma of sustainable development
The dilemma of sustainable development in the Philippines lies in the fact that our climate-change problems are caused by the warming of the entire planet, and this worldwide warming is caused by the actions of everyone in this planet. Unfortunately for the Philippines, our contribution to global warming in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions does not compare to the damage caused by typhoon exposure. While the Philippine emissions in 2014 was at 106.9 metric tons, China contributes the most at 10,328.7 MT, which is around 30 percent of all emissions.
However, even if the Philippines remains to be a low carbon-emitter, our country experiences the brunt of climate-change impacts. In February 2013, an empirical study linking windspeed exposure to socioeconomic variables was published. The study found that, on average compared to families who did not experience typhoons, income of families exposed to typhoons is lower by 6.6 percent, thereby leading to human capital disinvestments. In November that year, Supertyphoon Yolanda (Haiyan) hit the Philippines, causing impacts that Filipinos in Leyte and Samar provinces have not fully recovered from until now.
In December 2015, the Philippines, led by then Ateneo School of Government dean Tony La Viña, sent a 158-member delegation to the 21st Conference of Parties (dubbed as COP21) in Paris, France, that ultimately led to the Paris Agreement. During these negotiations, the country’s negotiators fought to set the limit of global warming only until 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial age and not until 2.0°C. Unfortunately, this year, the Duterte administration had announced that it will no longer send delegates to climate talks, even when a more recent empirical study in 2018 from the Philippine Institute for Development Studies links rainfall shocks with poverty.
Way forward
Economic growth has always been linked with capital accumulation and technological advancement. Understandably, countries would want to be part of the industry 4.0 bandwagon. Economic growth is simply the expansion of production. It therefore relies on the ability of labor and capital in transforming raw materials into higher-value goods. Economists have always ignored the role of natural resources in the equation, and its perceived abundance has been the usual explanation for ignoring the role of natural resource capital in production. However, ignoring land as another factor of production like labor and capital ignores how land is also able to transform seeds into crops. Ignoring marine resources means forgetting how the vast blue seas allow fish to grow from fingerlings. Mother Earth has always been an economic producer herself.
In September this year, Pope Francis sent a video message to the participants of the UN Climate Action Summit held in New York. In his message, the Pope linked our climate and environmental problems “with the human, ethical and social degradation that we experience every day.” He then called us to “think about the meaning of our models of consumption and production, and the processes of education and awareness, to make them consistent with human dignity.” There is also the Ling Jiou Mountain Buddhist Society, a Taiwan-based group of Buddhist monasteries founded by Chan Master Hsin Tao, which aims to establish the University for Life and Peace in Myanmar, as an educational institution that would respond to the ecological crisis. In January 2019, they invited a group of professors and researchers from various fields of study from across the world for the first Experimental Winter School at Yangon, Myanmar. At the end of two weeks, there was agreement among the researchers that changing economic behavior would require changing mentality in everyday life.
The dilemma of sustainable development is understandably difficult. Rethinking our development strategies, therefore, require strategies beyond economic planning. It requires changing economic thinking at the global scale. People across the world must change their consumption behavior if we hope to lessen the climate-change impacts at home. We must, therefore, rethink our participation in climate talks. We must also rethink how we teach basic economics. Perhaps, most important of all, we must rethink the power of the ordinary people in bringing about change. So, how do we harness that power?