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Philippines: Addressing disaster and climate risk in the financial system
By Benel D. Lagua, Executive Vice-President at the Development Bank of the Philippines
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In 1989, multilateral (World Bank, Asian Development Bank) and bilateral (Japan’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund or OECF), Germany’s KfW, Sweden’s Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, among others) institutions found DBP as an excellent fit and partner in their country assistance strategies being a government development finance institution and at the same time tasked to be the main conduit for the official development assistance funds to the Philippines. Funders compelled DBP to prescribe to project eligibilities and conditionalities heading to sustainable development. They strongly advocated the inclusion of good governance, human rights and equity agenda, and environmental integrity in the face of climate change.
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In fulfilling our dual mission of sustainability coupled with sound corporate governance, the bank integrates facets of disaster risk reduction in its processes. Our approach is both precautionary and corrective in nature, anticipating and preventing potential negative impacts. DBP’s practice in credit evaluation which incorporates environmental, technical and social concerns remains pacesetting in the Philippine banking industry.
This necessitates DBP to prescribe project eligibilities and conditionalities heading to sustainable development. It also advocated the inclusion of good governance, human rights and equity agenda as well as environmental integrity in the face of climate change. Hence, all environmental project proposals received by DBP are subject to Environmental Due Diligence processes conducted through evaluation reports and required documents for submission which includes environmental compliance certificate. This information is then included in the loan proposals to establish credit worthiness and determine its eligibility to specific overseas development funding facilities.
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Strengthening the organization to continue its operations during disasters, a bank-wide Disaster Recovery Test is annually conducted to ensure system availability, integrity and readiness of the Business Continuity Plans as well as Disaster Recovery sites. To keep up the environmental and disaster risk awareness in the bank, regular sessions for Board of Directors, Management and key junior officers are held regarding risk assessment and climate change. Briefings were conducted by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-Philippines).
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