The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) on Friday underscored the importance of climate-resilient infrastructure as the La Niña phenomenon looms, bringing more rains to the country.

“Now that we are expecting La Niña, we need to expect that there will be more intense rains and where that compounds are disaster risks,” DENR Secretary Maria Antonia Yulo Loyzaga said in an interview over Malacañang Insider.

“It’s really where we need to focus our own attention at this point and in terms of our investment as well. One of them is in what we call climate-resilient infrastructure,” she said.

Loyzaga mentioned that the need may not be solely physical in terms of engineering. She noted it can be a “combination of gray and green engineering.”

“So, we used both nature-based and the combination of those structural interventions in order to balance water supply where we need most and also deliver it where presumably before there was no water,” Loyzaga said.

Loyzaga cited as an example the island barangays in the country that don’t have access to potable water.

“What are the solutions? We need to understand what rainfall they get. Whether they have streams that are alive. In that case we need to provide filtration, whether they have water or not, and will determine whether desalination is the only option,” she said.

However, many barangays across the country “actually have to travel by bangka every day back and forth, and pay multiple times what water would normally cost just to have drinking water.”

“So, all of these combined with the science and technology associated now with climate risk management, need to be part of our DNA in terms of a country as far as really managing disaster risk for our own development,” Loyzaga said. PND