Yolanda: planning for extreme futures

Almost exactly two months before Supertyphoon “Yolanda” leveled Tacloban City, I witnessed a multisectoral gathering of residents of that city imagine it being hit in succession by a supertyphoon, a major earthquake and a tsunami in the 2020s. The group, which included local government officials, business representatives, academics, civil society people and ordinary citizens, foresaw the collapse of the local economy in the wake of such series of disasters. They did not reckon then that only one of those disasters would be enough to do that. Neither did they foresee farther the local economy falling apart. And yet the damage wreaked by Yolanda on Tacloban City and other areas goes way beyond economic collapse.

Apart from bringing the local economy to a standstill, Yolanda led—at least for a time—to a collapse in law and order, and breakdown in morals and dignity, trust in government, and even faith in God on the part of many victims and observers alike. Many have lamented that rather than unite us, as calamities should, in caring and concern to alleviate the plight of countless victims, we have instead been reduced into destructive divisiveness, bickering and blame-throwing. The tremendous damage Yolanda wreaked on countless lives, livelihoods and properties—and on top of that, on our very nationhood—was indeed something no one ever imagined, and nothing anyone could have planned and prepared enough for.

That gathering in September was an exercise in scenario-building organized by Worldwide Fund for Nature Philippines, facilitated by Brain Trust Inc. (BTI) and sponsored by BPI Foundation. The project, “Business Risk Assessment and the Management of Climate Impacts,” sought to help the city—one of 12 already covered by the project—plan for the adverse impacts of climate change, to which the Philippines is particularly vulnerable. Initially intended to focus primarily on business risks, the exercise was soon seen by the three cooperating organizations as best covering a wider cross-section of society, and a wider range of development perspectives. The planning tool employed was scenario-building and scenario-planning, now seen to be a much more useful approach in any road-mapping for the future, especially in a world where levels and dimensions of uncertainty seem to have multiplied with time. It is a major improvement over the planning done the traditional, unidirectional way familiar to most, where one defines a desired future state (vision); sets corresponding goals and targets; formulates strategies to attain them; and develops programs, projects and activities to put the strategies into action.

The problem with that approach is that too many uncertain factors beyond anyone’s control can push the plan way off course. When economic managers of the Ramos administration targeted double-digit economic growth by the end of his presidency in 1998, no one foresaw the Asian financial crisis that would stymie the growth momentum already achieved. Similarly, hardly anyone anticipated the 2008 global financial crisis and ensuing economic downturn, whose effects continue to hobble many western economies today. Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of hundreds of scientists from around the globe, recently declared that the effects of climate change have turned out to have been much worse than they thought, and that sea level rise is proceeding much faster than they had earlier predicted. There simply are too many unknowns and uncertainties around us that make planning for the future harder and trickier.

With so much uncertainty threatening even the best-laid plans, a preferable approach would be to anticipate at the outset several alternative directions the future could take, as influenced by factors beyond our control. Planners could then draw up corresponding courses of action to deal with the possible alternative scenarios that could conceivably arise. This way, the future that comes to pass should be close to one of several anticipated futures. This is much better than planning for a particular anticipated or desired future, then end up being far from it because some unforeseen events along the way threw us way off course. British economist John Maynard Keynes is quoted to have once said, “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

For the Taclobanons who took part in last September’s scenario-building workshop, that future came far sooner than any of them imagined. In fact, the sub-group that drew up the worst-case scenario went about the exercise somewhat half-seriously (as tends to happen with those who draw up extreme scenarios), thinking of their output merely as a reference scenario, not one to be taken as a credible option that could actually transpire. I can imagine what the members of that worst-case group then must be thinking now (I hope and pray that all of them survived Yolanda’s wrath). To them and their coparticipants in that scenario-building exercise, their least desired and probably least expected future not only actually came to be; it also came much too soon.

BTI has facilitated many such scenario-building exercises in varied contexts, including planning Mindanao’s future and anticipating the supply and demand balance for skilled labor in key cities, besides planning for climate change resilience. But nothing before Yolanda brought the lesson home better—that no scenario coming out of such exercise is too extreme as to be taken lightly and considered too farfetched to seriously plan for.

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E-mail: cielito.habito@gmail.com