Heat stress is driving Filipinos into a “climate poverty trap” where the poorest communities pay most for rising heat-related damages, according to a new report.
Although the country has entered its second month of the rainy season, the impacts of extreme heat are still deepening, with reservoirs hitting record lows amid the climate crisis and the looming threat of a Super El Niño.
Repeated exposure to extreme heat is eroding the health and livelihoods of climate‑sensitive sectors such as farmers, fisherfolk, and informal workers, the report found, as declining productivity, higher healthcare costs and disrupted income streams eat into already thin household assets, said authors from watchdog Greenpeace Philippines and the National Anti-Poverty Commission, tasked with ensuring that sectors affected by natural and human-induced disasters participate in government decision-making and poverty alleviation programmes.
These compounding losses “leave vulnerable households increasingly exposed to future heat-related shocks, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of poverty and climate vulnerability”, said the study released on Tuesday.
At the same time, the question of who pays to break this cycle is becoming more urgent, warned the analysis.
Development experts cited in the research note that every dollar spent on adaptation can avert two to US$10 in losses. In the Philippines, where extreme heat losses are estimated at around US$9.41 billion (P580 billion), that implies hundreds of millions to several billions of dollars in needed resilience investments.
Yet while communities on the frontlines are already absorbing the everyday costs of heat — from medicines and missed work days to improvised cooling — public spending to protect them is stalling.
The typhoon-prone nation currently spends an average of 1.7 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) for adaptation and resilience measures, based on government data but it scaled back on its adaptation spending from US$19.4 billion (P1.2 trillion) to US$13.6 billion (P844 billion) early this year. This was to curbing major items such as water sufficiency, climate-smart industries and services, and sustainable energy.
“These numbers paint a bleak picture of adaptation finance in the Philippines and expose a disconnect between the ambitions of the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) [which serves as the country’s blueprint for addressing heat stress] and the financial realities of making it happen,” said the study.
Where climate money comes from — and who it bypasses
Where the money comes from, and where it actually goes, is another major fault line in the heat crisis, said Greenpeace.
Of the US$72 billion the Philippines needs to implement its climate pledges, just 2.7 per cent is covered by public finance, with the rest expected to come from private capital that largely flows into mitigation projects with clearer returns rather than adaptation that delivers mostly public goods like safety and health, it said.
Greenpeace added that much of the government’s climate spending is also loan-based, raising future debt risks, while big-ticket adaptation infrastructure is often pursued through public-private partnerships that, as recent flood-control scandals showed, can open doors to graft and patronage and weaken, rather than strengthen, community resilience.
Adaptation funding and climate resilience programmes are not reliably reaching the people they are meant to protect, further warned the study, citing a 2025 Philippine Institute for Development Studies assessment which found that farmers and fisherfolk have expressed strong negative views of climate finance schemes designed for them, suggesting these mechanisms are either ineffective or largely inaccessible.
The problem is structural as climate finance frameworks and cross‑cutting institutions remain mostly at the planning stage, rendering those most exposed to heat stress — informal, low‑income workers without social protection — practically invisible, it noted.
Rather than treating adaptation as a sunk cost, the study urged the government and financiers to view it as an investment that pays “resilience dividends” through avoided losses, lower recovery spending, higher productivity, better public health, and stronger institutions.
As such, the public is being left to shoulder rising adaptation costs, much of it in the form of debt if funding models do not change, it added.
The report said: “The general public will be doing much of the heavy lifting to adapt to increasingly destructive climate impacts, particularly heat stress, and the most vulnerable sectors are left to pay for their own survival as they keep the country afloat.”
