3rd UK-PH Climate Change Environment Dialogue
13 April 2023 (Thursday) |14:30-16:30
Seda Vertis North Hotel, Quezon City
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Her Excellency Ambassador Laure Beaufils, Ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,

Distinguished guests,

Good afternoon and welcome to the 3rd Climate Change Environment Dialogue between the Philippines and the United Kingdom.

Today’s dialogue embodies a critical dimension of the continued partnership and collaboration between the Philippines and our development partners. We at the DENR and our partners across government, are working to recast our own roles now, given the interconnectedness of our systems and the existential challenges that we face from climate change.

As you see, we have the different national government agencies here present and we are constantly working to achieve synergies across different departments and offices in order to achieve our goals.

It is well-recognized that the Philippines, while it has made progress in the fields of DRR and climate change, remain one of the most vulnerable countries to natural hazards and to the impacts of climate change. The Philippines is now ranked number one on the 2022 World Risk Index, as we know.

While new risks are emerging, there are also new ways of working together. Shared values, synergy, commitment, and continued collaboration should be among our most urgent priorities and we are really grateful for this opportunity to work with the government of the UK to reach our common goals.

We are privileged to take part in this dialogue wherein there can be a mutual exchange of knowledge, experience, and expertise that can lead to a higher level collective outcomes. The DENR and our partners remain committed to these exchanges as we foster knowledge-based enabling environments for evidence-informed risk governance across our different mandates.

We’d like today to reemphasize the need to confront the climate emerging through comprehensive risk management that emphasizes evidence-informed prevention rather than responsive and pre-disaster recovery planning, rather than post-disaster recovery planning. The Philippine Development Plan particularly the chapter on climate action, which is Chapter 15 aims to accelerate climate action and strengthen disaster resilience, and it identifies three outcomes that are relevant to our discussions today: Climate and disaster risk resilience of communities and institutions must be increased; ecosystems resilience and biodiversity enhanced; and low carbon economy transition must be enabled. These will be discussed further during the presentations of our undersecretaries Anna Teh and Jonas Leones moving forward.

One of our takeaways from COP27 in CBD in Montreal and the UN Water Conference is the need for a comprehensive climate and disaster risk assessment to de-risk investment and accelerate towards both green and blue economic development. By taking all hazards and climate change as risk drivers, developing countries such as the Philippines have the opportunity to address urgent and specific challenges across sectors and scales.

We are deeply grateful therefore for the openness of the UK to hearing our country’s position on loss and damage, especially as it is a member of the committee. We are fortunate to have partners such as your country for having invested in this vision. We have a shared understanding and we believe that we can work together to have the last mile – our communities and our ecosystems that support them, and the need in making them first mile in terms of investments in impact-based early warning, environmental protection, climate and disaster risk resilience, and food, water, and energy security intersected.

At the DENR, we are advancing the mindset that we live in a multi-hazard environment and an interconnected world. Since these risks are complex, dynamic, and systemic, they will compound and cascade across sectors and scales. The interventions we need to design to confront this complexity must therefore be transdisciplinary, time-sensitive, and spatially-targeted, in order for them to be truly transformational.

The critical issue of our time is how we will survive and thrive in the face of multiple risks and uncertainty as we transition towards a low-carbon future.The choices and decisions we make today will determine the future we want. We must all recognize we have a unique but time-bound opportunity to invest in the resilience of natural, human, and engineered systems which could be vital to the survival of communities and ecosystems within which we work.

This is where we are especially grateful for the opportunity to join the High Ambition Coalition and the Global Oceans Alliance, the archipelagic nature of our countries, and our unique geographic locations present both promise and peril. Its true partnerships such as this where we can exchange science and other kinds of knowledge and experts that will allow our countries to join to deliver our contributions to the resilience and sustainability of our nations and our planet.

There are more opportunities for real change in front of us and you will hear about specific initiatives and projects later on. We hope that we will continue to work together so that we may chart and lead our ways towards an equitable and evidence-informed development trajectory for both of our countries.

Given the signing of our renewed partnership agreement this afternoon, I have no doubt that there will be new energies and new capacities that can be applied to hasten the achievement of these complex tasks.

On behalf of the DENR, we look forward to working with our partners in the UK who have shown unwavering commitment and steadfast support toward building a genuinely green and blue planet for all.

Thank you very much and we look forward to a rich discussion this afternoon.