Manila, Philippines – With the exception of a few pieces of hanging laundry, the first two floors of 65-year-old Veronica Castillo’s three-storey home are practically empty.
“Our belongings are up top. We build our houses upwards here. Every year the floods will scrape the ceilings of the second floor,” Castillo told Al Jazeera, surveying her home in one of Marikina city’s slums, among the most flood-prone areas of Metro Manila.
But while the government is building a pumping station to address the problem just five minutes away, construction has been going on so long that Castillo wonders whether it will ever be finished. “It’s been eight years,” she said.
Since taking office in 2022, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has spent about half a trillion dollars to address persistent flooding from extreme weather in the Philippines. But despite the significant spending, cities continue to be inundated in a country that typically sees about 20 typhoons a year.
During a speech in July, Marcos Jr boasted about his administration completing more than 5,000 flood control projects, of which 656 were in Metro Manila.
Days later, Super Typhoon Gaemi deposited a month’s worth of rain on the area within 24 hours, killing dozens and leaving parts of the sprawling city submerged.
Earlier this month, it was followed by Tropical Storm Yagi. Officials put the cost of the damage at 4.7 billion Philippine pesos ($84.3m) with nearly seven million people affected.
At least a dozen more typhoons are expected before the end of the year.
The Philippines has topped the World Risk Index‘s list of countries struggling to cope with natural hazards for 16 years in a row. According to the international engineering group GHD, floods and storms will cost the nation $124bn by 2050.
Some analysts say the government’s approach is failing.
“No amount of engineering can completely control floods,” said environmental geographer Timothy Cipriano from the scientist group AGHAM and the Philippine Normal University. “We might be able to control street-level flooding, but we have neglected the overflow from rivers and coastal areas.”
Cipriano notes that Metro Manila and its 12 nearby provinces are “one big basin surrounded with the coasts on some sides and the mountains on the other plus the many man-made activities means surface runoffs quickly increase, and thus, rivers overflow.”
Currently, the government has nine “flagship” flood control projects in the pipeline. Each involves building concrete or “grey” infrastructure to drain or trap excess water.
At a public inquiry last August, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) chief, Manuel Bonoan, said Marcos Jr’s accomplishments were only for “immediate relief” and admitted many big-ticket projects had encountered delays.
Government data shows that just one of the smaller “flagship” projects was completed this year, while the rest have languished in their preparatory stages since at least 2018.
This includes the Metro Manila Flood Management Project, which aims to rehabilitate 36 pumping stations and build 20 new ones by this year. Despite a $415m World Bank loan, only two stations have been rehabilitated and none of the new ones have been completed.
The 60-kilometre (37-mile) Central Luzon-Pampanga floodway, meant to drain stormwater from Metro Manila, was supposed to begin construction in 2024. However, last month, Bonoan conceded that delays had set the project back by three years.
The DPWH also reported that 70 percent of Metro Manila’s “antiquated drainage system” was clogged with rubbish and silt, hampering flood management. It also reported that the country lacks a national flood control master plan, with only 18 scattered plans for major river basins which are “still being currently updated”.
Perspective shift
Most flood control efforts steer stormwater west to Manila Bay or Laguna Lake in the southeast. However, civil engineering expert Guillermo Tabios III says this approach has been ineffective for many years, and sometimes just transfers flood risks to coastal communities.
“We divert around 2,500 cubic metres of water to Laguna Lake,” he said, adding that water also means “a lot of the surrounding towns will be submerged”.
Cipriano blames rapid urbanisation and nearby quarrying for strangling Metro Manila’s 31 rivers and their tributaries.
During Gaemi, Merjelda Toralba, 70, spent nearly 24 hours on the roof of her makeshift creek-side home. She had to tie a rope from her wooden doorframe to a coconut tree to stop the rising current from carrying the entire house downstream.
“The flooding is worse each year. And I’m more afraid each time it rains hard. In just a few hours, I’d be trapped and the waters just won’t go away,” she told Al Jazeera.
Environmental and sanitation expert Jose Antonio Montalban of Pro-People Engineers and Leaders (Propel) says much of the new infrastructure is costly to maintain.
In Yagi’s heavy downpours, sections of the Molino Riverdrive Project collapsed as floodwaters spilled onto the roads. Montalban blames unavoidable erosion to the cement and possible substandard materials, but “it was clearly over its maximum carrying capacity. Now repairs will cost taxpayers yet again”.
Montalban says what is needed is a “holistic approach” that considers “all factors economic, ecological, hydrological and social. Unfortunately for us, rudimentary engineering applications are the norm”.
During Gaemi, the government admitted that 71 of the Metro Manila pumping stations were unable to handle the rainfall, which was more than double the system’s 30mm/hour capacity.
Cipriano says the authorities need to look at flood-prone areas as a “sponge city. Instead of controlling water, you design spaces to accommodate water. Make it less of a concrete jungle, allow waters to seep or flow without constricting rivers.”
Big spender
Since 2015, the Philippine government has allocated 1.14 trillion Philippine pesos ($20.3bn) for flood control, with 48 percent of it during the Marcos Jr administration.
Independent public budget analyst Zy-za Nadine Suzara says probable “patronage politics” was involved after noticing that flood control was often a last-minute insertion by legislators into the national spending plan.
Despite a lack of discussion about the designs and methods to address floods, “suddenly a huge amount of the flood control projects are added during the last week of budget legislation”, she noted.
Congress has currently earmarked 779.38 billion Philippine pesos ($13.9bn) for the DPWH flood control efforts in 2025, approximately 12 percent of the proposed national budget.
Suzara says that flood control projects have always been considered corruption-prone because they lack mechanisms for external monitoring and often escape any rigorous scrutiny before the budget is finalised.
She called it a “waste of fiscal space. These funds could have been used for something with much better planning for climate change adaptation”.
For 2025, the Marcos Jr administration has tagged 1.01 trillion Philippine pesos ($18.1bn) of the budget as “green spending” or Climate Change Expenditures, an increase of 84 percent. This includes a climate lump sum, which means its specific use has not been identified. The lump sum was more than one billion Philippine pesos more than in 2024.
“Climate change shouldn’t be used as an excuse to steal from the people’s coffers,” Congress Assistant Minority Leader Arlene Brosas told Al Jazeera.
Marcos Jr has acknowledged the taint of corruption and asked senators to look into the issue during last year’s typhoon season.
Senator Joel Villanueva, a vocal advocate for better flood management, said he will “file cases against those who must be held liable”. To date, no individual has been prosecuted. Villanueva says he is preparing to tackle the matter again in upcoming senate proceedings.
Brosas added: “The people deserve transparency and accountability in climate expenditures. Funds must be channelled into legitimate climate adaptation programmes rather than into the pockets of corrupt officials.”
Schools often double as evacuation centres for communities affected by floods. Lessons are postponed so that dozens of families can take shelter in the classrooms, surviving on food donations.
“It’s hard, lying on wet mats in crowded rooms, wishing for better weather,” said Castillo, who rushes her five grandchildren to the nearest evacuation centre every time there is a risk of floods.
Should the government fail to fix the problem of flooding, residents like Castillo face the prospect of many more years crowding into evacuation centres as they wait for the floodwaters to subside.
