Now that COP30 has wrapped up in Brazil, and now that the Philippine delegation has returned to Manila, it’s time to take a serious look at the Philippine environment and COP’s progress over the years.
Bottom line: The environment continues to worsen, and COP hasn’t done much.
Conference of the Parties refers to annual meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is the only decision-making body for international climate policy.
Established after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the framework was adopted to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations and prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. COP1 was held in Berlin in 1995.
This year approximately 50,000 participants from over 190 nations went to the conference, including world leaders, ministers, non-governmental organizations, and observers. Among them was a 34-member Philippine delegation.
Regarding the local climate, the Philippines is in a poor position, and the environment continues to deteriorate.
These are not the words of wild-eyed environmentalists. They are sober assessments by scientists studying country-wide climate change impacts on a global scale.
For example, according to the World Risk Index of 2025, the Philippines ranked No. 1 out of 193 countries in terms of disaster risk. Even more alarming, the Philippines has held this position of having the highest disaster risk for many consecutive years — sources vary on exact streak, but it’s been No. 1 for 17 to 21 years.
On another measure, the Global Climate Risk Index of 2025 and 2026, the Philippines ranked No. 7 for impacts of storms, floods, and heatwaves in 2024, and it was in the top 10 worldwide from 1995 to 2024 for fatalities and economic losses from extreme weather.
And on the 2024-2025 ND-GAIN Country Index, from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, the Philippines ranked No. 116 out of 187 countries on measures reflecting high vulnerability and low readiness.
In these and other studies, the Philippines is consistently ranked as one of the most vulnerable countries — if not the most vulnerable — to climate change impacts. This is due primarily to its extreme exposure to natural hazards, its geographical characteristics, its high population density in risk-prone areas, and socioeconomic factors that limit adaptability — that is, the ability to recover quickly from a disaster.
This is probably a good place to mention that the situation for disaster preparedness in the Philippines could have been much better if a handful of criminals in Metro Manila had not stolen ₱1 trillion earmarked mainly for disaster preparedness.
As an archipelago of more than 7,600 islands with the world’s fifth-longest coastline — some 36,000 km — much of the population and infrastructure is in low-lying coastal zones directly in the Northwest Pacific typhoon belt.
Situated on the so-called Ring of Fire earthquake zone, the Philippines faces an average of 20 tropical cyclones per year, plus frequent floods, storm surges, landslides, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes.
Climate change amplifies these: Typhoons bring heavier rainfall, stronger winds and rises in sea levels that are locally worsened by land subsidence in areas like Metro Manila. Also, heatwaves are intensifying,
Over 110 million Filipinos live in high-risk areas, with high poverty rates, reliance on climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture and fisheries, informal settlements prone to flooding, and strained infrastructure.
Projections show stronger typhoons, more intense El Niño and La Niña cycles, coral reef loss — a serious threat to food security — and health impacts. Health impacts include heat-related illnesses and deaths, the spread of diseases. Children are particularly affected, with excessive heat and floods disrupting nearly 9 out of 10 schools in the past decade.
Almost 7,000 Filipinos died in typhoons in the past 10 years, and studies project an 8.18 percent rise in excess mortality for every 1°C increase in temperature.
There reportedly was an increase in heat-related illnesses and deaths during an April 2024 heat wave in Metro Manila.
Turning to COP’s track record, fans of COP always are upbeat because they are true believers. In fact, the performance has been poor to dismal. At its 2015 COP21 conference in Paris, the conference set a 1.5⁰C limit on temperature rise above pre-industrial levels, but the planet today is running at 1.4⁰C to 1.5⁰C above pre-industrial levels. So, in terms of geological time, the planet is now plowing through the numbers like greased lightning.
There are several reasons for COP’s failure. One is that it has become a lobbying mecca for fossil fuel interests to pitch their plans for continued oil and gas development. This year there were 1,602 registered fossil fuel lobbyists at the conference, outnumbering the Philippine delegation by almost 50 to 1.
Another is that, historically speaking, the world’s all-time record polluter of the atmosphere, the United States, has taken a highly inconsistent and partisan interest in the COP meetings and targets. Not to mention that this year — under the quote-unquote leadership of President Donald Trump — it did not send a single U.S. government representative to the conference.
Historically, the U.S. has contributed roughly 75-80 percent of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere when weighted by global warming potential, compared to the Philippines’ 0.5 percent.
The phrase “climate injustice” refers to the unequal distribution of climate change’s causes and impacts, where vulnerable populations suffer the most despite contributing the least to emissions. This is the Philippines’ situation today.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.