Making Science serve the Country
Recent Tweets about proposed legislation to “institutionalize a permanent, science-based, multidisciplinary national institution for climate resilience and disaster risk reduction [to be] named the UP National Climate Resilience Institute” make me very happy as that is a very important matter for the Philippines.
A scientist like Dr. Mahar Lagmay who spearheads such work is making science serve the country in a very critical matter I wrote about in the article Rising Waters in the Philippines last September. A modern country with modern vulnerabilities needs modern tools to protect people and investments.
Institutionalizing such tools is evidence of what Karl wrote in April that We Are Not Starting From Scratch because it utilizes foundations built ever since Project NOAH which would become part of the institution. And it is far from the Spaced out dreams a la Kidlat Tahimik and yoyos in space I wrote about last year.
It is also extremely far from the idea of some older Filipinos that a Filipino should win the Nobel Prize, something akin to Filipino Pride, which I think is as old as ilustrados being happy about Juan Luna’s awards. Nothing wrong with that and we all can continue to be proud of Alex Eala and other Filipinos that excel.
And hopefully real use of science in protecting the nation itself will finally lay unneeded myths to rest like that of the flourescent lamp being invented by Agapito Flores or the moon buggy having been Pinoy-designed. Quiet pride like that of the Dutch who have managed the sea for centuries is more real.
Comments
11 Responses to “Making Science serve the Country”Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying...-
[…] Making Science serve the Country Categoriespersonal AnGoL […]
The Society of Honor by Joe America 
Thanks for this article.We need this bad.
Next is how to manage brain drain.
Science is one side of the coin, corruption is the resistance. The corporate world is science based and will become more-so I would imagine as AI pushes decisions toward history, logic, and profit. Government might follow this path too if officials will merely augment their thinking with AI probes, the value of such demonstrated by Karl’s work here.
President Marcos is leaning into science, I think. His “normal” presidency trudges along, remarkably sane in the chaos that follows him about like a cloud of ill smelling fart.
maybe ex senator cynthia villar was telling the truth when she said, baliw kayo sa research! said in the heat of anger, when she was confronted with pleading for more research grant year after year with seemingly always the same research conclusion of more research needed for researchers to then continue on with the research maybe for the indefinite future. the therefore and finality of research result ex senator cynthia villar wanted was summat far from completition, only that more research needs to be done, justifying the lack of conclusivity of the prior result, and the mind boggling cycle goes on.
we have a number of peer reviewed science journals published nationwide, but there seems to be big gap between research findings and policy application for findings to be indeed useful.
with AI, we maybe be able to track researches, their results and applications, if such results are not deemed private and confidential, as of.
though I have heard of few successful entrepreneurs who privately approached researchers and for fee, do the research for them. like that small time entrepreneur who farmed lobsters and wanted how best to keep lobsters alive and thriving in confined man made places, kept operating cost to minimum, and was successful that the entrepreneur now supplies a number of restos with fresh lobsters, as well as upgrading his business, got himself new house, car and motorcycle, as well as providing for his best and dearests.
That’s true, academic researchers push knowledge forward and the political and corporate worlds ignore it because the gap between knowledge and application seems large. Lobster man is the exception, and Project Noah, now that the ignoramus Duterte is out of the picture. AI has great value to collect brainpower wherever it has been written down, and apply it. I’m optimistic. Competition is enhanced, I reckon. The lazy and corrupt will hopefully get squeezed out.
One can only wonder how much money the Philippines loses — not just to contract fraud, but to rebuilding what expert forewarning could have protected. Beyond the recent public anger over flood control projects scandal there is an underappreciated cost: disaster reconstruction concentrates resource control in a small number of politically-connected actors, and that concentration becomes a vector for even more corruption.
Here in the United States, FEMA was designed as a coordinating and response agency due to prior inefficient federal disaster response, but over decades it became into something akin to government-backed disaster insurance that subsidizes rebuilding on the same floodplain, hillside, or coastline where the next hurricane will strike or riverbed will overflow. Withdrawing FEMA assistance is politically toxic not because Americans frame it as ayuda, but because it has been messaged for decades as “your own tax dollars coming back to you.”
I was in the Philippines immediately after both Yolanda and Odette and saw this directly. Funds often did not reach affected communities expediently or in the amounts promised, if at all; loyal supporters seemed to receive more than nonsupporters. In the Philippines the politician or official who controls the spigot from which funds flow often commands great leverage over loyalty. What was remarkable and inspiring to me was how communities tried to get by regardless (if sometimes with a resigned acceptance). After Yolanda, I remember a tito laughing, saying “God has answered our prayers,” when we found a sheet of corrugated roofing that had blown over during our walk. There seemed to be a sense of Filipinos coming together after Yolanda, at least before the political attacks on PNoy began. After Odette, that communal togetherness seemed noticeably diminished — which I suspect the rise of social media in the intervening decade had something to do with.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4pk07npvvo
I have great interest in mangroves and saw a recent Tulane University study using NASA Landsat imagery which mapped global mangrove loss and recovery over the last decade.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec9773
Philippines mangrove forest coverage today is less than half what it was in 1918. Satellite imagery suggests sustained regrowth since 1990 (Figure S9 in Supplementary Materials PDF of the study linked immediately above). Some of the mangrove regrowth (from my own observed estimation) was from abandoned fishponds, allowing mangroves to naturally expand back to where the forest had been before being cleared. In other areas there were local and national supported mangrove replanting programs. Despite the Philippines having a greater awareness of the role mangrove forests play in climate resilience and fisheries — enabling a Philippine mangrove forest regrowth success story — the Philippines was not prominently featured in the above study. I wonder if the absence reflects a failure of Philippine academia engaging outside of their own institutions rather than a lack of data. Hopefully the proposed national climate resilience and disaster risk reduction agency will work together with international partners and academic research institutions.
IMHO I think that mangrove reforestation deserves particular attention as a flagship policy because it is simultaneously ecological, economic, and social. Replanting mangrove forests provides coastal protection from typhoon storm surge, supports local fisheries, sequesters carbon, and (maybe most practically) it is community labor that generates livelihoods and shared purpose at the same time.
The recent NPA clashes in Negros also had me thinking: Rather than subjecting college students to performative ROTC drilling in NSTP “service” that are nominally optional but functionally forced by the absence of slots in non-ROTC alternatives why not redirect that youthful energy and idealism into something like an expanded Philippine civic service corps? Something like an AmeriCorps or Peace Corps analogue, with mangrove replanting, watershed rehabilitation, and community hazard mapping among its deployable missions, would give young Filipinos genuine formative experience with another aim of feeding data and volunteer labor back into resilience infrastructure.
As for future corruption scandals: Prevention is cheaper than reconstruction, being harder to steal.
super typhoon yolanda was not only mega disaster, it was also pledges disaster. many of those that pledges mega donation did not honor their pledges after having their names flashed brightly across the national media as benevolent, and after having been thanked profusely by uber grateful filipinos, the donors (some of them foreigners) backtracked and were rarely not heard again.
AI Overview
Unfulfilled and delayed pledges were a major issue following Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in 2013. While the international community promised billions in aid, tracking revealed that nearly 80 percent of cash pledges had not been released to the Philippine government for recovery efforts within the first few months.
Key Reasons for Unhonored Pledges & Delays
Government Accountability Efforts
KB, this was disinformation which was immediate at the time and sustained in public “knowledge” until now was pushed by anti-PNoy groups at the time who ultimately coalesced around Duterte a few years later:
https://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-claim-foreign-donations-yolanda-victim
Back in 2015, when Yolanda became a convenient way to attack “the yellows” by the Duterte camp:
https://business.inquirer.net/201989/p94b-released-by-govt-for-yolanda-rehab
In actuality the Philippines received way more assistance than originally pledged, but that assistance was coursed through direct transfers to NGOs rather than the government due to government inefficiency. PNoy set up the Foreign Aid Transparency Hub or FAiTH tracker to provide transparency to international donors. The same transparency tracker was later used as proof of the early DDS memes of “80% stolen” when in fact the 77% had actually gone direct to NGOs on the ground and 23% through government agencies.
It seemed to me at the time that corrupt politicians were just agent they couldn’t enjoy the jackpot they expected as they waited for foreign donations to course down through the government channels, salivating at the once in a lifetime opportunity to abuse a major calamity in order to enrich themselves. It was not a surprise to me many of those politicians later supported Duterte.
in philippines we have what amount to civil service training programs for students and young people. though I’d like to stress that students and volunteers be paid stipend to cover miscellaneous cost as meals, transport, insurance, etc. in case they get injured while volunteering. it is not always easy for parents to shoulder all the added costs of volunteering, aside from tuition paid.
IA Overview
Yes, the official and mandatory program for college and university students is the National Service Training Program (NSTP). Implemented under Republic Act No. 9163, it is a required civic education and defense preparedness course for all incoming first-year college students. [1, 2, 3]
Students are required to choose one of three service components to complete during their undergraduate studies: [1, 2]
For younger students, the government operates the Special Program for Employment of Students (SPES), which provides youth aged 15-30 with short-term paid work opportunities during school breaks to help fund their education.
Yes, I forgot to add that a civilian service corps should have meals, transportation and incurred expenses paid for.
Within NTSP the majority of students are in CWTS (~87%), then ROTC (~12%), with LTS having miniscule slot availability (~1%).
Also knowing the “work” CWTS participants are engaged in, I can say the program seems equally as useless as ROTC participants drilling with rusted M-14s and M-1 Garands. It is “make work” without being paid. A lot of students I’ve spoken to since the NTSP was finally fully implemented in the 2010s was that CWTS was uninspiring and felt forced, though CWTS was preferred to the students who got stuck with ROTC against their choice. IIRC the whole point of NTSP was to get away from mandatory ROTC and the ROTC corruption scandal involving the death of the UST student. LTS seems to me to be the most impactful, yet it has the fewest slots available…
What I’m suggesting is not a NSRC-path program that would draw upon NTSC “graduates” who have thin skills and experience, but a sustained civilian service corps made up of the youth, paid a stipend or small salary, and deployed across the Philippines to engage in government community programs as part of the mandatory service.