IT was reported recently that, for the third straight year, the Philippines had the dubious honor of topping the list of 193 countries in the 2024 World Risk Index (WRI) Report, an annual ranking produced by the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict of the Ruhr-University Bochum in Denmark. The news should have raised concerns and inspired a serious conversation among the public and policymakers, but it did not, even despite a string of recent damaging storms. It seems that after the WRI results were duly noted by the media, they were forgotten; if they inspired any reaction at all, it was perhaps resignation. There was no metric for “complacency” in the WRI analysis, but perhaps there should have been, because it is the biggest risk of all.
Since it did not seem to be explained well in most news reports, the focus being mainly on the results rather than how they were determined, the WRI “score” for each country, according to the organization conducting it, is determined as the geometric mean of scores for the country’s exposure risk to disasters and its vulnerability. Scores are on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores representing higher risk.
Exposure is the extent to which the country’s population is at risk of experiencing the consequences of earthquakes or volcanic activity, tsunamis, coastal or river flooding, tropical storms, heat waves or droughts, and sea level rise. Vulnerability is made up of three dimensions, including susceptibility, which describes “structural characteristics and conditions of a society that increase the overall likelihood that populations will suffer damage from extreme natural events,” and hence, experience a disaster; coping, which refers to the ability to respond to a disaster; and adaptability, which refers to the ability to take steps to prevent or reduce potential harm from future events.
The Philippines’ overall score of 46.91 was the highest in the world, far ahead of second-highest Indonesia, which had an overall score of 41.13. The Philippines was deemed to have the fourth-highest exposure to natural disasters, behind China, Mexico and Japan. The Philippines’ score of 55.03 in the “vulnerability” metric fell into the “very high” category, according to the index, but was not among the 10 highest in the world. That is not much comfort, however, as those countries with higher vulnerability scores are among the world’s most dysfunctional countries, places such as South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.
Obviously, global indexes such as the WRI are to some extent matters of subjective judgment on the part of the organizations that create them, but there seems to be little to dispute in the risk ratings given to the Philippines. Our natural disaster exposure is obvious; we live in a seismically active country that lies astride the Pacific typhoon belt. There is nothing we can do to mitigate those risks, everyone understands that, and that is the source of the country’s persistent complacency.
That comes from the bottom-up, we believe. One of the key awards conferred during our forum recognizing outstanding cities and municipalities on Thursday this week was for Emergency and Disaster Management Excellence. The winners were Los Baños, Laguna, for the municipalities and Mandaue City in Cebu for the cities, but during the judging, our panel noted that many of the nominated local government units have excellent disaster management records, as well as good records of efforts at risk reduction and mitigation.
Yet every calamity, even a comparatively moderate one like the storms within the past two weeks, inevitably leaves deaths and injuries, and damage to property and agriculture in its wake. Moreover, this seems to be taken as par for the course by the public; accepted, perhaps, as an unavoidable cost of living in this otherwise wonderful country.
We cannot rely solely on the government to save us in times of disaster. One shocking fact that emerged during our forum is that the disaster response budget for most local government units is quite insufficient and might only allow for a few pesos of disaster response spending per affected person. Our government leaders will always do what they can in the case of a calamity, but they cannot do it all. It is everyone’s responsibility, individually, or as families or businesses, to understand the risks they face and know what they will do if those risks manifest themselves. That does not mean living in fear; on the contrary, not being complacent and knowing how to respond to a calamity relieves uncertainty and fear.