Ladies and gentlemen, good morning.

I’d like to start by just giving a brief – a short, short introduction of the Coastal Cities at Risk. It began in 2011 with a small grant from the Canadian government, and eventually was expanded to focus on the Philippines where Coastal Cities at Risk look for a home. There is no natural constituency for resilience. We had to build it. And so building on the different disciplines as well as building different community relations, it found a home here at the Ateneo through the leadership of Fr. Jett Villarin, and of course Dr. Emma Porio. So we are very grateful that today is actually generated, all of this wonderful work that is being used by communities.

Technologies as we know play a critical role in enhancing climate and disaster resilience through evidence-based and data-driven decision-making. They can contribute to resilience through first anticipation towards prevention when technology can prevent or enhance preparedness to climate and disaster risks, and secondly, through agility and responsiveness to these risks when in fact, a hazard strikes and in trying to prevent that hazard from actually becoming a full-scale disaster.

Technology allows us the capacity to quickly adjust and make decisions in order to mitigate negative impacts of multiple hazards that we face and take advantage of opportunities for building resilience in the future.

In the climate change space, the Paris Agreement highlights the importance of technology in mitigation and adaptation actions. Technology development and transfer as discussed in the COPs is an essential mechanism for advancing and scaling up transformative climate actions. Technology provides the necessary decision support and allows for robust and risk-informed actions and policy-making. We recognize the value of technology and allowing for more granular and timely data, semantic analysis, big data analytics, and visualization, as well as supporting strategic foresight, systems transformation approaches and tracking tools. And I would also like to take note of what Fr. Bobby had said, while there had been some progress from Paris, we definitely are not on track.

At the DENR, our Geospatial Database Office or GDO as we call it, makes use of earth observation, remote sensing, and geospatial systems for environment and natural resources monitoring and quantification, conservation, rehabilitation, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Our GDO maps our water resources, our mineral resources, our forest resources, and our lands. We have for example, identified all over the country all the surface water that we have. Our rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands determine the country’s water resources and inform our measures to address water scarcity.

We have mapped our island barangays where we proposed to have in fact investments on solar disalienation plans so these communities can actually have water to sustain themselves. Our GDO also maps our watersheds, our water retention ponds to address flooding and all the infrastructure that is in place. We aim to establish an open access directory of Philippine watersheds with data on monthly and annual water discharge. The water retention ponds that have been identified will have a multi-purpose use including irrigation. This can also inform water-related projects of the DPWH with whom we work very closely as well as with the National Irrigation Authority. We also have analyzed the priority sites for mangrove rehabilitation, both important for mitigation, adaptation as well as, of course, disaster risk reduction.

Just yesterday we launched the Mangrove Map in partnership with the Philippine Space Agency, a collaboration in which it engaged citizen science in mangrove conservation and rehabilitation through remote sensing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This forms part of the Memorandum of Agreement with PhilSA to establish a comprehensive geodatabase for environmental resources accounting which involves mapping geospatially resources through science and technology applications or incorporating cutting-edge tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Our Forest Management Bureau also makes use of unmanned aerial vehicles, satellite imagery, GIS and GBS receivers, among others in their mapping and monitoring of activities for watersheds and forests.