‘Pivotal funding key for PHL’s climate resilience’

THE Philippines needs to have more clarity and pour more efforts into financing climate change adaptation to make agriculture and food production systems more resilient and high-yielding, an official of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) posited.

- By ANDREA E. SAN JUAN

“When we talk about climate and environmental issues, a lot of it is on mitigation by renewable energy. That is really where the focus has been; that we're rounding in terms of what we contribute in the greenhouse gases,” BSP Assistant Governor Pia Bernadette Roman Tayag said last Monday.

Speaking at the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines (EJAP) Sustainability Forum, Tayag underscored that the country’s problem is in adaptation.

“Climate change is already here, and the Philippines is so vulnerable. How do we now finance adaptation?,” she said. “And adaptation is hard to finance.”

According to Tayag, 90 percent of global climate finance goes to mitigation, “and only less than 10 percent goes to adaptation.”

“And that’s what we need in the Philippines. So this is where we really need more clarity on the taxonomy, blended finance, [and] innovative financing to support adaptation,” she told journalists.