Green groups tell Philippine government to stop deceptive rhetoric at COP 30

Belem, BRAZIL – As world leaders once again convene for the annual conference of the parties (COP), an environmental group in the Philippines demanded that the government must stop deceiving the world about its response to the climate crisis and hold accountable those who are behind the corruption-ridden flood control projects. 

“As the world arrives at COP30 Belem, the Philippine government once again is set to parade itself as a supposed champion of climate justice. It will promise bold action and demand reparations and climate finance from the Global North while boasting about its role as board chair on loss and damage. Beneath this spectacle, the government glaringly tramples climate justice at home,” Kalikasan Peoples Network for the Environment said in a statement. 

The Philippines is reeling from the impacts of consecutive typhoons Tino (international name Kalmaegi) and Uwan (international name Fung-wong). Provinces in the Visayas were severely affected by the flash floods when typhoon Tino struck on November 4, 2025. Today, November 9, wind signal number 5 has been declared over central Aurora, Polillo Islands, northern Camarines Norte, eastern Camarines Sur, and Catanduanes.

Many areas were inundated despite billions worth of flood control projects. 

The group lamented, “It [The Philippine government] sells out the Filipino people to corrupt and greedy bureaucrat-capitalists and plunderers, enriching the elite through flood control scandals and leaving behind mass death from typhoons like Tino. Twelve years after the devastation of Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), justice remains a distant dream for survivors and their communities.” 

The COP 30 will open tomorrow, Nov. 10 to 21 in Belem, Brazil. 

The group criticized what it calls as “greenwashing” by the Philippine government. The United Nations defines greenwashing as the promotion of false solutions to the climate crisis that distract from and delay concrete and credible action.

Kalikasan PNE said that in the COP 30, the official Philippine delegation will boast its plans to scale up renewable energy, claiming a 50-percent share in the national mix by 2040 and expressing supposed concern for indigenous rights and social protections. However, the group said that based on the lived experiences of our rural poor on the ground, these initiatives displace farmers, rural poor, indigenous peoples, and fisherfolk, stripping them of land, homes, and livelihoods while intensifying their climate vulnerability for corporate profit. 

In a previous Bulatlat report, residents Barangay Paguludan-Salindeg in Currimao in Ilocos Norte suffer from the impacts of solar energy projects in their community, which caused extreme heat and worsened flooding. 

Read: As more solar farms rise, Ilocos Norte community fears worsening climate impacts

“Their ‘just transition’ is a cover for land grabbing, mining, reclamation, and watershed destruction, all serving the greed of comprador corporations and foreign investors,” the group added. 

Read: Push for renewables threatens lands and livelihood in the Cordillera

Kalikasan National Coordinator Ana Celestial expressed her frustration and anger over world leaders, mega-corporations and the Philippine government “for their negligence, heartlessness, complicity and sheer avarice in the face of relentless calamities.” 

She lamented that while Filipinos grieve and rebuild what’s left from their devastated properties, “those in power only offer band-aid solutions and shallow condolences, unwilling to change the exploitative systems fueling the climate crisis.” 

“Multinational corporations and their local partners grow rich from the destruction of our land and labor, extracting resources and polluting our environment, yet they evade accountability, protected by the same politicians who are supposed to uphold our interests,” Celestial said in a statement. 

Celestial stressed further, “World leaders gather under the pretense of climate ‘action’ but refuse to address the root causes: imperial plunder, monopoly corporate greed, and the persistent oppression and exploitation of our poor.” 

Kalikasan PNE reiterated that the imperialist powers of the Global North must be held into account and compelled to pay as they “carry historical and primary responsibility for the climate crisis.”  “Yet the same urgency must be brought to exposing and holding to account the Philippine bureaucrat-capitalist state and its cronies who enable this plunder and engineer mass suffering through massive corruption, negligence, and anti-people policies,” Kalikasan PNE added. 

Since the formation of the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI), the body has yet to prosecute a single person responsible for the corruption in flood control projects. Many groups lamented that the authorities are quick to arrest activists and those who expressed anger towards public officials and their accomplices who amass billions of pesos through government projects but not on those who plunder the nation’s coffer. (RVO)

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