Struggle to Survive: The Climate Crisis Has Reached Catastrophic, Existential Heights; The System Must Be Changed Now!
Quezon City, Philippines — The Philippines is being pushed to the edge of survival. Flooded roads, drowned fields, collapsing ecosystems, and communities gasping under the weight of disaster reveal a truth we can no longer deny: the system that enabled this destruction must be confronted, dismantled, and transformed.
The Global Fight for a Fossil-Free Future: Fast, Fair, Funded, Feminist is a collective uprising of the Filipino people and peoples across the world demanding a decisive break from the economic and political order that has sacrificed lives, lands, and futures for profit.
The latest UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, attempts to sound hopeful about limiting the overshoot of the 1.5°C threshold. But its own findings point to the inevitability of escalating, irreversible impacts. We are running out of time. We can't afford to delay getting on the right path of immediate and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. These cuts will never happen if the system that creates these crises—economic, geopolitical, war, and domination—continues to exacerbate the system of oppression and inequality further.
In recent weeks, roads turned into rivers and fields into seas as the enhanced southwest monsoon—supercharged by consecutive typhoons—submerged provinces and cities across Luzon. More than 8 million people were affected, and agricultural and infrastructure losses exceeded ₱8.4 billion.
Meanwhile, a record-breaking Super El Niño has engulfed the country’s central and southern regions. The Department of Agriculture (DA) warned farmers in Mindanao to prepare for dry spells and droughts. The DA identified about 141,000 hectares of farmland in Northern Mindanao vulnerable to the impacts of drought. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the Super El Niño we are experiencing will grow stronger and continue until February next year. They even added that if current readings and projections continue, this El Niño could be the strongest on record.
These are not isolated events. They are symptoms of a global system built on extraction, exploitation, and inequality.
And at the center of this system are the United States and its allies, whose historical and ongoing emissions, military activities, and fossil fuel expansion have driven the planet to the brink. For decades, the US and other wealthy nations in the Global North have reaped immense wealth from fossil fuels, while exporting the worst impacts to countries of the South like the Philippines. Their corporations dominate global energy markets, their governments subsidize oil and gas giants, and their geopolitical alliances protect polluters' interests over the survival of people and ecosystems. The climate crisis did not emerge from nowhere—it was engineered by the world’s most powerful economies, spearheaded by the United States and its allies, and sustained by local elites and governments in the Global South who helped entrench a fossil-fuel-war empire built on extraction, inequality, and sacrifice zones.
It is clear that the climate crisis is presenting itself to the Philippines in the most extreme forms. Added to the issue of corruption of allocated budgets for flood control, which are yet to be fully resolved, and the continued environmentally destructive projects such as mining, the reclamation projects in Manila Bay and Bulacan, the push for false solutions like fossil gas, waste-to-energy projects in various places in the country, the Marcos administration’s insistence on developing nuclear energy as a power source despite major risks outlined by communities, and the continued expansion of fossil fuels like coal, it can only be said that the climate crisis and the suffering, deaths, and damages this brings to Filipinos are being profited off of.
The problem we face now is utmost existential. With real, direct threats to our lives, there is no other time but now to move away from fossil fuels and transition to a just and equitable renewable energy system. To fund this, we must hold accountable the rich, developed countries that have profited most from the climate crisis. As Global South countries like the Philippines bear the brunt of climate impacts, Global North countries should pay up in climate finance to support rehabilitation, adaptation, and a just transition.
On this Global Day of Action, the Filipino people rise against the rotten, corrupt, and failed system that profits from calamities brought about by these destructive capitalist pursuits. Any system that allows profit to be made from climate crisis-exacerbating projects, when farmers in the north see their yields wiped out by record-breaking floods from enhanced weather systems and farmers in the south watch their fields crack in heat and drought by Super El Niño, is a system that functions only through abuse and oppression of the poor. It must be dismantled and replaced.
As rich countries gather once again in global summits to decide the world’s future, the voice of the Global South must thunder through their halls: Your Time is Up! Stop imperialist domination! We demand and hold the polluters accountable for the destruction of the planet. With climate goals slipping out of reach, the only path forward leads to the end of the oppressive global order that has brought us to the brink—and to a new system rooted in justice, equity, and solidarity among all peoples. ###
For inquiries, contact:
Christian John P. Argallon
Junior Media and Communications Officer
Philippine Movement for Climate Justice
For other PMCJ-related concerns, contact:
Sheila Abarra
Senior Media and Communications Officer
Philippine Movement for Climate Justice
Viber: +63-991-669-2356
WhatsApp: +63-938-089-8327
Comments