📷: Kilusang Mayo Uno | FB
Now, it is the turn of Greenpeace Philippines to excoriate the Philippine government for its abject failure to stop the hemorrhage of badly-needed flood control funds as well as the irrational deployment to mitigate climate change through the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR.)
In a scathing statement, Greenpeace Philippines savaged the administration of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. for gross negligence that may amount to financial infidelity and incompetence. The organization slammed what it described as “obscene greed” of officials and contractors who divvied up billions of pesos from ghost flood control projects. While the unlamented Rodrigo Duterte administration ushered in fiscal impunity highlighted by the P51-billion allocation for Rep. Apollo Polong” Duterte purportedly for flood control projects (FCPs), official figures show that as much as P1.029 trillion have been lost to graft since 2023, more than half of it, or P560-billion, in this year alone.
Greenpeace should not lose sight of the fact that it is the Filipino people that is paying for the plunder committed by lawmakers, bureaucrats and contractors, whose collective action makes it obligatory for the national government to float bonds monthly, borrow trillions from domestic and foreign sources to pay off debt denominated in pesos and dollars. Nearly 70% of the taxes collected by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) come from withholding taxes, meaning they are collected at source. Neoliberals continue to spout the myth that moneybags like oligarchs pay the bulk of the tax revenues. When the conspiracy of grafters pockets between 20% and 35% of flood control projects, they steal from the pockets of workers, farmers, employees and marginalized citizens.
Since Marcos Jr. opened the Pandora’s box, Malacanang now is grousing that the “enemies of the state” are “exploiting the issue” to organize demonstrations and protest actions to attack government and the list of such enemies probably now includes Greenpeace, along with Ibon Foundation, which has scored the current regime for walking on its head in crafting the same graft-ridden budget year-in and year-out without analyzing whether the money was used efficiently, rationally and responsibly. As Ibon Foundation pointed out on June 14, 2025, before Marcos Jr. “exposed” the FCP scam, the Marcos Jr administration is trapped in the same discredited neoliberal paradigm of past governments – obsessed with attracting foreign investments and favoring big business instead of spending on people’s welfare and strengthening the economy from within. Adopting a genuinely people-biased transformative economic agenda can eliminate poverty, hunger, and underdevelopment, and accelerate sustainable development to ensure no Filipino is left behind.”
Figures from the National Integrated Climate Change Database and Information Exchange System (NICCDIES) website show that this year, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) holds the lion’s share of the climate-tagged projects: P800 billion of the P1 trillion of projects and controls 90%, or 24,764 out of 26,874. Around P560 billion of the P800 billion is lost to corruption, for a whopping 70%. DPWH climate-tagged FCPs this year are valued at P248 billion. It is suspected that P173 billion of that amount nourishes graft. Conspicuously, DPWH officials in 2024 were stumped by the insertion of hundreds of FCPs that originally were not included in the budget that the department prepared. If this were really the case, then the additional FCPs were inserted by Malacanang or by the bicameral conference committee (BCC) comprised of congressmen and senators.
“A trillion pesos is a staggering, absurd amount, siphoned off by avaricious, self-serving officials and contractors from projects meant to help people cope with escalating climate impacts,” argued Greenpeace campaigner Jefferson Chua. “This is unacceptable. They’re not just plundering government coffers; they’re also crippling the ability of millions of Filipinos to survive in the face of an escalating climate crisis. Theft of climate funds at such a scale is atrocious, and offenders are akin to climate criminals.” Greenpeace says that corruption and greed undermine the ability of millions of Filipinos to cope with climate change. Thousands of Filipinos lose their and millions find their homes and livelihoods ruined due to more frequent disastrous flooding. Floods have also caused massive economic losses for local governments as well as the national government.
The government doesn’t have enough money to fund its climate adaptation needs or cover the costs of climate losses, with the Department of Finance (DOF) admitting that the losses from 2010 to 2020 amounted to P506.1 billion. However, DOF is saying that government also spent P2 trillion for disaster risk reduction and management from 2015 to 2022. A 2022 World Bank (WB) report projected that the Philippines can lose as much as 7.6% of its gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 and 13.6% by 2040 due to climate change. “The corruption scandal puts Filipinos in a hopeless situation: not only is our climate financing woefully inadequate to avoid future losses, but also, more than half of what little allocation we have for climate action is being stolen. Filipinos are left with pitiful change from the billions plundered by a few,” said Chua.
In conclusion, Greenpeace raised the following demands to the Marcos Jr. regime: Ensure accountability from corrupt government officials and contractors; end corruption and put in place measures to ensure transparency in government; create systems for greater people participation and ensure public access to government information, and; put in place mechanisms to safeguard climate funds from corruption. “The greed we’re seeing in this corruption scandal mirrors the greed of fossil fuel corporations that have put us in this climate crisis in the first place and continue their harmful activities, putting the quest for profit over the safety and survival of people and the planet. Alongside this much needed corruption investigation, President Marcos Jr must also hold the world’s biggest climate polluting corporations accountable: make them stop further fossil fuel extraction and production, and make them pay for losses and damages.”
