PLANET Earth is getting warmer. The intense rainfall that Cebu experienced on Nov. 4 may once have been considered a 100-year event, but not anymore. The same goes for Typhoon Odette that devastated Cebu in December 2012 and the 2023-2024 El Niño.
While Cebu’s flooded communities are slowly recovering after Typhoon Tino, the 30th Conference of Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) is under way. COP has returned to Brazil where the framework convention was signed 33 years ago. That’s longer than a generation ago, and while achievements have been made since then, it is not enough. Global warming has slowed down but not stopped. The world has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level.
Scientists are worried. Climate disruptions, climate scientist Kate Marvel told CNN, can be very drastic. We can’t expect them to happen gradually, giving us enough time to adjust and prepare: “Sea level rise is no big deal until it overcomes your flood defenses.”
“The more we learn, the worse it looks,” warns Joeri Rogelj of the Grantham Institute in London (CNN, Nov. 12, 2025).
In the Philippines, it’s not just looking worse. It is worse, as experienced, not just learned. Thus, we can’t simply do nothing. As part of the Global South, we can push for action and policies that actually work for us, and demand financing from the rich countries which historically have contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions. Nongovernmental organization coalition Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) is in Belém to promote zero waste as one of the most cost-effective, practical and fast strategies to reduce methane emissions from the waste sector. Currently, this sector is responsible for about 20 percent of global methane emissions. Methane “accounts for a third of net warming since the Industrial Revolution,” according to the Global Methane Pledge website.
GAIA is calling on governments and multilateral development banks to invest in “cost-effective climate solutions that make people’s lives better and leave no one behind,” to quote Yobel Putra, a GAIA campaigner from Indonesia. A new report from the organization documents the impact of zero waste initiatives in Buenos Aires, Accra (Ghana) and Quezon City. While these initiatives may seem small in scale, the point is that community-based zero waste systems can easily be replicated and scaled depending on needs and capacity. Benefits are multiple in terms of job creation, potential for soil restoration and improved local food security, positive impact on local economies, integration into the formal sector of informal waste sector workers, among others. In the context of climate change, the proper segregation — at source — of organic waste and its diversion to composting eliminates methane from waste. Yet, GAIA found that international development banks and governments have a preference for “capital-intensive polluting projects” with 99 percent of climate finance for the waste sector going to waste-to-energy (WtE) incinerator projects.
And that takes us back to post-Tino Cebu City, where the P5-billion WtE project is still looming in the horizon. The facility will sit on a 5- to 7-hectare property in upland barangay Guba. Guba is part of the Central Cebu Protected Landscape. Environmentally unsound development of the city’s hilly lands has been identified as a major contributing factor in the flooding of lower-lying areas of Central Cebu. Real estate developer Monterrazas, in particular, has been called out. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources was forced by public outrage to investigate. Aerial shots show staggering mutilation of the mountainside. Monterrazas isn’t responsible for all the flooding in Cebu. However, the threat to lower-lying communities from this and similar projects is real and can no longer be ignored, especially as the risk of extreme rainfall is increasing with global warming.
Monterrazas has cut more than 700 trees since 2022. In Guba, how much natural vegetation including trees will be removed to make place for the Cebu City government-approved WtE facility and the road that garbage trucks will ply every day? How much capacity to hold rain water will be lost? Considering the elevation and distance of Guba from the crowded neighborhoods and commercial areas where the trash is generated, the trucks will consume a lot of fuel to make the daily trips back and forth. This means more carbon dioxide emissions, aside from the ones to be generated by the WtE. All in all, a bad deal for the environment and Cebu’s future.
Pushing forward with the waste-to-energy facility in Guba would be to ignore the destructive effects of this type of construction within Cebu’s hilly lands. Now is the time to preserve and rehabilitate, not cut down and bulldoze. Successive calamities put an immense strain on our resources, making prudent management more urgent than ever. This is the opportune time to ditch costly WtE and the unsustainable, polluting development model it represents, and instead embrace the solutions that “make people’s lives better and leave no one behind.”