WEATHER SYSTEM IN THE PHILIPPINES

The Philippines is regarded as one of the countries on earth that is most vulnerable to the effects
of climate change. References to various rankings that place the country at the top of the
vulnerability scale are a staple of both academic and popular articles on the effects of climate
change. Along with the socioeconomic histories of colonialism and capitalism, as well as
environmental destruction caused by colonialism and post-colonialism, the archipelago's unique
geographic location within Southeast Asia exposes it to severe weather occurrences, which
contributes to its vulnerability. With all of the cyclonic activity produced in the Pacific Ocean,
the Pacific Typhoon Belt hits a large portion of the eastern seaboard. More than any other region
of responsibility, typhoons famously pass the country on average twenty times annually with
varied degrees of intensity according to PAGASA(2022). The state has taken on ever-increasing
levels of responsibility for understanding, preventing, and reducing the effect of extreme weather
occurrences in response to scientific concern about climate variability and change. This
trajectory of climate response has been coproduced within shifting colonial and postcolonial
political economies, where the production of scientific knowledge has been highly integrated
into anticipatory disaster management, commonly at the forefront of global trends in disaster
management. For instance, the Manila Observatory, founded by Jesuit priests under the control
of the Spanish colonial administration, was one of the first and most complex projects in the
Asia-Pacific. In Warren’s (2015) estimation, the Observatory was “a world standard
meteorological observatory”. Due to the disastrous effects of typhoons on the colonial economy,
notably shipping, it was developed in the 1880s, allowing for inadequate preparations and the
coarse prediction of cyclonic activity (Hennessey, 1960). The Marcos administration launched
institutional reforms centered on disaster management in the aftermath of a particularly
devastating sequence of typhoons that hit the politically significant Metro Manila area in the
1970s. These included the creation of a national disaster preparedness plan in the months
immediately following Typhoon Sening's impact (1970), the reformation and rapid
modernization of the weather bureau in 1972 (renamed the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical
and Astronomical Services Administration, or PAGASA, which means hope in the Tagalog
language), and the establishment of a national disaster coordinating council in 1978 with a large
cross-sector membership. Beyond these legislative changes, disaster brought on by extreme
weather also contributed to the cronyism and authoritarianism of the martial law years of the
Marcos administration by, for example, justifying the beneficial distribution of domestic relief
goods to political allies and their constituents, allowing the creation of personal slush funds for
the Marcos family from money nominally identified for disaster relief, and concealing the
appropriation of international aid that was intended for disaster relief. (Warren, 2013)
References:
J.F. Warren (2015) Philippine typhoons, sources and the historian
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12685-015-0131-0
J.J. Hennessey (1960) The Manila observatory https://www.jstor.org/stable/42720428
Waren (2013) A tale of two decades: Typhoons and floods, Manila and the provinces, and the Marcos
years http://apjjf.org/2013/11/ 43/James-F.-Warren/4018/article.html