Why Filipinos must embrace, not resist water
The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,641 islands, with a coastline twice as long as China’s. Sixty percent of our people live on the coast, and yet we act as if we were a landlocked country. We are a nation destined to live with floods, tides, and landslides—but we still build as if water were the enemy.
Every typhoon reminds us that our housing codes, our subdivisions, our cities are stubbornly anchored on an old dream: dry, stable land. But the land is no longer stable. In Metro Manila alone, subsidence is measured at more than a centimeter a year. The seas are rising faster than the global average. Floodplains that once absorbed water are paved with concrete. We cannot keep treating water as a hazard and land as a destiny. We must become what we already are: an amphibian nation.
Ask people in the lowlands, and they know it viscerally. When I asked Jomel Cruz, municipal disaster risk reduction officer of Macabebe, Pampanga, how residents were coping with perennial flooding, he quipped: “Tinutubuan na nga po kami ng palikpik (In fact, we are beginning to grow fins).” It was half-joke, half-lament: people adjusting every day, yet left without systemic support.
The Sama Dilaut of Tawi-Tawi, for their part, show the opposite adaptation. As fellow PDI columnist Rufa Guiam observes, when Badjao communities spend too long inland, they say they feel “landsick.” Their bodies and spirits belong to the sea. These voices remind us that amphibiousness is not alien to Filipinos—it is already in our blood and memory.
Yet our institutions spend billions trying to fight water instead of living with it. After the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, agencies attempted to dredge lahar from rivers—an almost Sisyphean task, since rivers replenish what is removed. Many misguided flood control projects have often become, in practice, nothing more than lip-smacking opportunities for plunderous contractors to fleece the people in the name of “protection.”
The result? Rivers are abused, budgets are drained, and floods persist. What if instead of forcing rivers into straightjackets, we gave them room? What if instead of pouring concrete, we poured imagination into amphibious living?
Filipinos have lived with water before. The Sama-Bajau built their lives on boats and stilts. Communities in the Agusan Marsh adapted with floating houses. Yet in our modern cities, we recoil from such forms, preferring to rebuild subdivisions on sinking ground.
The alternative is not regression but progression. We must normalize water villages and amphibious housing as legitimate, serviced, and dignified. We must raise roads and homes on elevated structures, not deny the floods, but rise above them.
This requires rethinking tenure systems. Land titles are secure, water rights are not. The Fisheries Code and the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act already hint at a broader regime of water tenure. Why not formalize it? Water Tenure Instruments could grant communities legal, long-term rights to live with and steward defined water spaces.
Recognized water tenure would turn “squatters on stilts” into legitimate amphibious citizens, protected by law and responsible for stewardship.
Mangroves, wetlands, and reefs already perform the work of breakwaters and floodplains. To cut them down for reclamation is to cut one’s own defenses. Nature is infrastructure, and its restoration should be budgeted as such.
If water divides us physically, digital currents unite us. With mobile penetration exceeding our population, with satellite internet reaching far islands, and with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven flood forecasting saving lives, ICT is the connective tissue of an amphibian nation. It allows fisherfolk to market their catch directly, barangays to share flood maps in real time, and citizens to receive hazard alerts in their hands.
To flourish, we must embrace six shifts: (1) Plan on ecological boundaries—river basins and ridge-to-reef socio-ecosystems; (2) Institutionalize water tenure—securing rights to live with water; (3) Scale nature-based infrastructure—mangroves, wetlands, reefs; (4) Legitimize amphibious housing—elevated and floating communities; (5) Grow the blue economy—aquaculture, ferries, seaweed; and (6) Leverage ICT, AI, and smart transport and communication—for archipelagic interoperability.
The Philippines ranks number one in the world for disaster risk. That ranking will not change until our mindset changes. Perhaps it is time to stop resisting water and start inhabiting it. We are, after all, an amphibian nation. And only when we accept that destiny will the floods that drown us become the tides that carry us forward.
