Blog Verité

It’s around 10 a.m. each morning that Noemi Reyes’s heart fills with hope. That’s when her husband Marionito’s boat appears on the shimmering horizon of the Pacific. By the time his skiff has been hauled onto the shingle beach, it’s already clear whether his toil has been profitable. Today was not: just eight small sardines and mackerel from five hours casting handlines at sea. “Almost nothing,” laments their 11-year-old son, Cjay, as he clambers back up the slope to their shack.

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The catch is sufficient to provide the family a proper meal but won’t help rebuild their home, which was destroyed late last year when a record-breaking six consecutive storms battered the Philippines. Ever since November, the Reyes family has lived here, beneath tarpaulin and nipa palm, wedged between crashing waves and a coastal highway in northeastern Luzon. When it rains, water gushes through gaps in the roof. At night, passing juggernauts rattle the structure, shaking them from their slumber. With no locks or even doors, passing strangers sometimes wander inside. “I find it hard to sleep and worry that one of the trucks might hit us,” says Noemi, 42, as she cleans and guts the fish for traditional sinigang sour soup.

It’s a precarious existence that is all too common in the Philippines, an archipelago nation of 115 million people scattered across more than 7,000 islands. The sea remains the lifeblood of the country. Fishing employs over 1.6 million people, whose catch is the nation’s principal protein source, a daily bounty of some 12,000 tons. But it’s a relationship that has become increasingly strained. Intensifying typhoons and dwindling catches are transforming what has always been the font of life into a source of destruction and despair. “Sometimes the sea is all about luck,” shrugs Marionito, 50, as he collapses exhausted onto the timber platform that sleeps the couple and five of their nine children.

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If fortune has deserted the Reyes family, odds are increasingly stacked against all the 600 million people around the globe who depend on small-scale fisheries and aquaculture. Coastal communities from Bangladesh to Cuba and from Senegal to Vanuatu are finding their livelihoods and security increasingly challenged. Rising greenhouse gases are increasing the intensity of extreme-weather events that both reduce fish stocks and make accessing them more difficult and dangerous for this generation and the next.

“Coastal communities are on the front lines, facing rising seas, brutal storms, and tidal surges that destroy millions of homes, businesses, public infrastructure,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and a former senior government minister of Grenada, tells TIME. Stiell is no mere onlooker. Just last July, Hurricane Beryl devastated his home island of Carriacou, where 98% of homes and buildings were severely damaged or destroyed, displacing over 3,500 people.

Society’s most vulnerable are bearing the brunt, especially the young. UNICEF estimates that around the world, an average of 20,000 children are displaced every day, 95% by the same floods and storms that render coastal fishing communities increasingly hazardous. And the Philippines has the dubious distinction of hosting the most child climate refugees. According to UNICEF, the Philippines experienced a record 9.7 million child displacements from 2016 to 2021, owing partly to 60% of the population living by the ocean—more people than live in Canada—as well as sea levels rising at up to four times the global average.

“Children are seeing their schools flooded, health services and water systems damaged, and crops and other food sources washed away,” says UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell. Along with a litany of health risks including malnutrition and waterborne disease like cholera and dengue, displaced youngsters suffer disrupted education and are more likely to drop out of school to support their families, meaning fewer opportunities for them to build more prosperous and secure lives than those of their parents, whose own occupations are ever more fraught.

“Constant threats of displacement create chronic anxiety and trauma, particularly among children,” says Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross. “There’s no semblance of normalcy because they constantly move, evacuate, relocate. Frequent disasters become emotionally and mentally exhausting.”

The cascade of hardships stands to compound a larger peril. Each pound of fish caught by wild fisheries involves just 1⁄2 to 3 lb. of carbon, while red-meat production ranges from 15 to 50 lb. But the tropics are predicted to see communities displaced from the coast to cities, and declines in potential seafood catch of up to 40% by 2055, turning coastal populations from sustainable food producers into urban consumers with an exponentially larger carbon footprint. In response, governments, NGOs, and the local people are striving to instill resilience into coastal communities, strengthen homes and infrastructure to better cope with extreme weather, and diversify incomes to mitigate the impact of a changing climate. But providing future generations with greater prospects than the last is an uphill battle.

“What people told me is simple: they want their families, their wider communities, their businesses and livelihoods to be better protected,” says Stiell. “They want to focus on education, health care, economic opportunity—not have to scramble to survive the next storm.”

Few nations have internalized the ocean like the Philippines. For centuries before Ferdinand Magellan first set foot here in 1521, the inhabitants were natural seafarers, docking on its islands and thriving aboard floating communities on boats called balangay, a word that today has come to mean the country’s smallest political unit, or village.

Filipinos make up over a quarter of the global seafaring worker community. Put differently, 1 out of every 5 Filipinos currently employed abroad are working on the water. Manila remains one of Southeast Asia’s top ports, while the surrounding waters, including those within the hotly contested South China Sea, teem with oil and gas deposits.

But this kinship with the ocean has also made the Philippines acutely vulnerable to the extreme weather that is becoming both more fierce and frequent. Situated in the Pacific’s “typhoon belt,” the Philippines experiences an average of 20 tropical cyclones annually, most occurring from July to October. Typhoons are known as compound events, since low pressure effectively sucks up seawater to inundate land just as heavy rainfall surges down hillsides and high winds batter homes and infrastructure. “The coast is really where all the problems meet and the intensity is increasing,” says Robert Vautard, a working group co-chair at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Many Filipinos live with the constant fear of displacement. At the opposite end of Luzon from the Reyes family, the village of Sula, Vinzons, in the Bicol region sits nestled on a sandbank barely 400 ft. wide separating the Pacific Ocean from tidal mangroves. Without even an access road, life here revolves around fishing, shrimping, and farming oysters and crab. The only non-aquatic industries are a nearby watermelon farm and the occasional cluck and snuffle of chickens and pigs.

Around four times each year, village captain Rosemarie Abogado gives the order to evacuate,
and Sula’s 269 families clamber onto boats for the 20-minute journey to a nearby elementary school. There they must hunker down on mats for days while inclement weather submerges the village in swirling eddies of seawater, destroying crab pots, fishing nets, and homes. “Usually, it’s men who are reluctant to leave the village because they want to take care of their livestock,” says Abogado, sitting beneath the mango tree whose shade serves as an informal village hall.

After the typhoon passes, the villagers return to see what remains. Following last November’s storms, Ricky Pioquinto found his two-room thatch house had been flattened. “It’s only luck whether the pigs get flooded or not,” says the dad of three. A fattened swine can fetch 12,000 pesos, or $215. “Sell a pig and you can buy anything,” Pioquinto, 41, says. By comparison, fishing and crabbing are less profitable these days. A pound of crabs brings between 100 and 200 pesos ($1.75 to $3.50) depending on the size and quality. But catches have been getting sparser. “Sometimes we don’t catch anything,” says Pioquinto.

Around one-third of the world’s fish stocks are overfished, including those in Southeast Asia, where China operates a colossal fishing operation. Climate change is compounding the problem. Oceans play a major role in climate dynamics: 83% of the global carbon cycle is circulated through the oceans, which have absorbed 93% of the excess heat from greenhouse-gas emissions since the 1970s.

But warmer waters alter the distribution of fish species, pushing those more suited to cooler temperatures farther and deeper, while reducing oxygen levels, impacting fish survival and productivity. Estimates suggest that at current rates of warming, fish and other marine species will be pushed around 20 km (12 miles) every decade. Meanwhile, ocean acidification, caused by increased carbon dioxide absorption from the atmosphere, is degrading coral reefs vital for marine life, while harming shellfish and other organisms with calcium carbonate shells. “On top, these cyclones and storms have a really negative impact on the ecosystems as well as fishing infrastructure,” says Michelle Tigchelaar, senior scientist and impact area lead for climate and environmental sustainability at the WorldFish NGO.

All of this means future generations of artisanal fishers will not see the catches that sustained their parents.

The frequency of typhoons, locally called bagyo, means Filipinos are used to responding to them. The national weather bureau has an alphabetical list of names for storm systems which repeats every four years. A name is retired only when it is attached to a cyclone that has caused widespread destruction and loss of life.

One name that will never return is Yolanda—what Filipinos call Typhoon Haiyan—which killed more than 7,000 people, displaced 47.5 million, and caused more than $12 billion in damage in 2013. Yolanda was the deadliest storm to have ever struck the Philippines and more than anything served to redefine the nation’s relationship with the ocean. Stretching 500 miles from tip to tip, its sustained winds of 195 m.p.h. tore into the central Visayas region, where storm surges of up to 23 ft. snapped coconut palms like matchsticks and razed entire towns.

Marinel Sumook Ubaldo was just 16 years old when the maelstrom ripped apart her home perched on the shoreline of Matarinao, Salcedo municipality, in Eastern Samar. “Only three concrete pillars remained,” she recalls. Survivors were isolated for days without food or clean water and spent months with no electricity nor proper shelter. “We were literally eating whatever we could find floating on the water,” says Ubaldo.

All the Ubaldo family possessions disappeared; dead bodies littered the devastation. Like nearly all the local fishermen, her father lost his boat, destroying both his livelihood and sense of self-worth. Even if it had survived, the seas remained too rough for small vessels for some six months after the storm, and people recoiled at the thought of consuming fish that may have grown plump on the corpses of their departed neighbors. “He has been fishing since he was 8 years old,” she says. “So it really affected him.”

Yolanda’s wake left hundreds of orphans, but even those like Ubaldo whose family had survived had their childish innocence ripped away. “Afterwards, I felt grown up,” she recalls. “We lost our home. We literally went back to zero. I don’t know how I would be able to go to college, so I became a breadwinner.”

While working multiple jobs including at a fast-food restaurant to support her family, Ubaldo eventually won scholarships to study social work at university. But that helpless feeling stuck with her. A month after Yolanda, another typhoon struck, but this time nobody would take in her family, which was forced to shelter huddled next to a mountain. “I felt like I was just done being ‘resilient,’” she says. “So we lobbied our local government unit to be more proactive.”

In 2019, Ubaldo organized the Philippines’ first youth climate strike. Today, she works in Washington, D.C., for the League of Conservation Voters environmental advocacy group, and has testified on climate issues at the U.N. and U.S. Senate. “During disasters, people are gracious that they help each other,” she says. “But trauma really comes after a disaster: What should I do now?”

After Yolanda, the Philippine government added a new “level 5” to the existing four grades of storms, stressing the imperative for people to seek shelter when the worst arrives. But for many, the psychological bond with the ocean had been forever broken. “That relationship of the ocean both giving life and unfortunately, with these climate disasters, increasingly taking life away, is something that’s very difficult to wrestle with,” says Sean Devlin, a Filipino Canadian comedian and filmmaker who has been documenting displaced communities for over a decade.

Yolanda exposed other vulnerabilities that have made the Philippines a test case of disaster response. The sheer force of these storms can remake the very shoreline where communities exist. Too often, poor villagers don’t have deeds or other documentation to codify their ownership of land that has been used by their families for generations.

This lack of documentation exposes these communities to disaster capitalism. Around the world, natural disasters—including the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina the following year—have entrenched this concept, whereby crises create a blank sheet ready to be exploited by Big Business. It can happen even where ownership is clear. In post-Katrina New Orleans, destroyed public schools, housing, and health care facilities were replaced by private alternatives. In effectively commercializing the response, financial interests clashed with humanitarian goals. Something similar is now happening in the Philippines.

After Yolanda, the Philippine government enlisted the help of influential private firms to lead the recovery effort. Tellingly, those that secured development partners were mostly urbanized areas or strategic locations for transport and other investments, while remote municipalities found it harder to attract help. In the city of Tacloban, the epicenter of Yolanda, previously thriving communities were declared “no-build zones” as they were deemed too dangerous for human habitation. Instead, retail shops and strip malls sprang up.

If alternative housing was provided, it was typically set back many miles from the coast—while seemingly safer, it was impractical for those making a living at sea. “One of the fundamental things that I see anger expressed over is lack of consultation in terms of the response to storms and how people are relocated,” says Devlin.

In 2023, Devlin released Asog, a black comedy set amid a real Visayan community still struggling from the social and economic fallout of Yolanda. The film features residents of Sicogon Island, some 6,000 of whom were subjected to a poststorm land grab perpetrated by Ayala Land Inc. to build a luxury resort. Following Asog’s success on the festival circuit, Ayala eventually started listening to residents’ demands and has agreed to pay $5.1 million in reparations to 784 displaced families.

Most of the cash has been used to build 474 new storm-resistant homes within easy reach of the ocean. Still, the local community continues to fight with Ayala over the deeds. “Ayala has delivered just a portion of what they committed to,” Amelia Dela Cruz, president of the Federation of Sicogon Island Farmers Fisherfolks Association (FESIFFA), said in a statement. “We won’t give up until they fully comply with the agreement they signed and we have been given the titles to our land.” (Ayala Land Inc. did not respond to repeated requests for comment from TIME.) It’s a remarkable victory of society’s poorest over entrenched corporate interests.

The Philippines has also become a leader in securing legal protections for communities displaced by climate change. In September, lawmakers for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao—a swath of the nation’s second largest island boasting over 2,000 miles of coastline with rich fishing waters—passed a Rights of Internally Displaced Persons Act to safeguard people’s access to basic necessities, health care, education, employment, cultural practices, freedom of movement, and popular representation.

The law is the first of its kind in the Philippines and one of only a handful worldwide. While refugees have specific charters governing their rights, including the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, people displaced within their own borders still technically enjoy all their national protections, as well as those enshrined by international human-rights and humanitarian law. However, in reality they often slip through the cracks. “Displacement has been a painful reality in our homeland,” Bangsamoro Government Chief Minister Ahod Balawag Ebrahim said upon the law’s passing. “But today, we declare that the Bangsamoro will no longer be a region where displacement defines our people’s lives.”

The need to instill resilience in communities is key—and remains an ongoing debate. Regions across the Philippines have begun building towering seawalls to protect against storm surges, though many locals doubt their efficacy. Tacloban residents have criticized the fact that their new seawall is shorter than the storm surge from Yolanda. And if the walls are breached, the fear is these concrete perimeters may impede receding floodwaters and increase the chance of drownings and destruction.

Half an hour’s drive from the Reyes family in northern Aurora, Lucy Faner Ruiz also had her home destroyed in last winter’s storms and now resides with her son. The 68-year-old retired teacher believes a half-built seawall 200 m from her home exacerbated the damage by retaining the floodwater and preventing it from draining away. “I won’t rebuild until the seawall is completed,” she says, standing amid the splintered wood and corrugated-iron scraps of her toppled home.

Others favor natural alternatives to seawalls. Standing in gum boots by the lapping water of northern Luzon’s Casiguran Sound, Jose Bitong stabs the mud with a metal spear, pumps his arm to widen the hole, and then thrusts in a mangrove seedling. It’s a routine Bitong and his small army of volunteers at the Casiguran Mangrove Rehabilitation and Protection Organization have repeated more than a million times since 1996, helping to regreen over 1,160 acres of coastline.

Aside from acting as natural barriers against storms and floods, mangroves reduce erosion while providing vital habitats for aquatic species that help replenish fish stocks. In addition, mangroves and coastal wetlands sequester carbon at rates 10 times that of mature tropical forests. “My goal is to plant as many mangroves as possible for climate-change mitigation,” says Bitong, who operates two nurseries that cultivate 20,000 mangrove seedlings for his own organization and to donate to others.

It’s not the only way local people are taking charge of their future. In the face of depleted fish stocks, younger coastal residents—aided by foreign and domestic NGOs—are leading the charge in trying to diversify into previously shunned species and develop new revenue streams, like cultivating seaweed for export.

On Sicogon Island, once the Ayala compensation was announced, FESIFFA could’ve just congratulated themselves and waited for their new homes. Instead, they insisted that local people join the building work. That way, islanders can learn new trades and take charge of future renovations and construction, enhancing capacity while keeping more money inside the community. “It’s so impressive and just a testament to allowing communities to really envision and lead solutions to these disasters,” says Devlin. “They understand their situations better than anyone else.”

It’s for this reason that aid groups like Oxfam Pilipinas concentrate on targeted cash donations for vulnerable families to use on housing, livelihood tools, or education as they see fit. In the 2024–2025 financial year, Oxfam Pilipinas spent over $4.5 million toward humanitarian interventions, around half in cash for 189,807 individuals belonging to 37,961 households, including the Reyes, Ruiz, and Pioquinto families.

Few want to rely on a dilatory and distracted state. When TIME visited these communities, campaigning was in full swing for May’s Philippines general election, and seemingly every pillar and beam had been festooned with party colors. In absurdist irony, even the Reyes family’s shack had not escaped crass political adornment. “Two candidates visited and asked if they could stick up their posters,” shrugs Noemi, glancing forlornly at the coiffured hair and beaming smiles stapled overhead. “But neither said they would help us.”

Help is desperately needed—and fast. Our mid-April visit was only the third occasion that Marionito had managed to take his boat out this year, owing to treacherous, churning currents left over from the winter storms. Instead, he’s been working as a day laborer cutting grass and planting crops on a nearby farm. Now he has only until the returning monsoon renders fishing too dangerous in August to earn sufficient cash to rebuild their home. Noemi is doing her best to contribute. After preparing breakfast for her kids, she trudges to the wreckage of their former house to collect palm fronds to bundle into brooms, which she then sells for 12 pesos, or 22¢. “Working from morning until afternoon, I can make 10 brooms,” she says. In every way, the Reyes family feels their lives drifting farther away from the ocean.

Asked whether he wants his kids to follow in his footsteps, Marionito doesn’t hesitate. “Never,” he says, gazing out at the deep blue. “The fisherman’s life is full of uncertainty.” And one fighting a relentlessly rising tide.

Campbell and de Guzman reported this story out of the Philippines.