I attended last Monday Cebu City’s Climate Change Adaptation Scenario Exercise conducted by the Word Wide Fund for Climate Change and the BPI. I found the exercise provocative as it requires us not just to listen to and absorb what the speakers are saying but also to say what we have in our minds. Former National Economic Development Authority director general and secretary of economic planning Cielito Habito (during the time of president Fidel Ramos), gave an overview of what scenario planning is all about followed by the workshop. Before the workshop, there was also an overview of the city’s demography, economy, physical condition and other related information.
The first thing we did during the workshop was to identify the forces that we believe will drive Cebu’s future. We were more than 30 and each of us was made to think of one driver at least. Many ideas came but in the end we agreed with the following: (1) the city’s governance and political climate, (2) water resources, (3) education, (4) planning, (5) land/watershed management, (6) population, (7) energy and technology, (8) business, (9) infrastructure and (10) location. We were then made to picture where the city is in terms of these drivers, mostly negative, and what we want them to look like in the future. For example, in the planning part, almost all agreed that there is chaos in the city’s physical development. In the future, we want the city’s physical development to be better organized.
After putting governance at the center of two intersecting lines and placing the relative position of each of the other drivers north, east, south and west of the center, including what is negative or positive about them, we were grouped into four in accordance with the quadrants that were formed out of the two intersecting lines. Each group was then made to write a story of Cebu’s future within the next 10 years and every 10 years thereafter until 2032. We were to focus our story on the particular drivers that fall along the two lines forming the quadrant. The result gave us four possible ideas of what the city will look like 10, 20 and 30 years from now. Very Interesting.
In the end, Habito told us to see what the future means to us, especially in business, where most of the participants of the exercise came from, and how we respond to them. He also called for our comments about the whole exercise.
Many things were said about the implication of Cebu’s future to business and the value of the exercise. I mentioned that the drivers could basically be summed into a few. One is governance because of the government’s role in our individual life and society. What we want do to can be helped or stopped depending on the kind of government that we have. An inept and corrupt government will surely not help and only hinder progress. The second is business because it is the sector that mobilizes our resources, employs people and produces what we want. The more enterprising and innovative the business sector is, the better society is as a whole.
The third is our land and other natural resources. Cebu City is much bigger than other cities in Cebu and areas in the Visayas and Mindanao. Unfortunately less than 30 percent of the city’s land falls below 18 percent in slope which is considered fit for human settlement. This put a low limit to the city’s development, the reason we reclaimed land from the sea and why many people move to neighboring towns and cities when they build their homes or put up a new business.
How we plan the optimal use of our limited habitable land will also determine the city’s growth in the future. Shall we just allow our businesses and people to move out or keep them in by a judicious use of land that would allow for more high-rise residential and commercial buildings?
Another key driver is Cebu’s geographic location with respect to neighboring islands in the Visayas and Mindanao, and by extension the rest of the other cities in Asia, that happens to be favorable to the city commercially and in many other respects. How do we make use of and protect this advantage? By having a good port and airport, true, but how good are they now? Moreover, who is going out to seek new business for Cebu?
Perhaps for lack of time, the exercise did not include the determination or presentation of key trends, like our projected population, level of economic activity and changes in technology, to guide us in scenario building. Planned or not, growth and changes in the structure of the city’s population and economy and other forces beyond our control like technological change, will also determine what the different stakeholders have to do in the future. There is more to be said about scenario building and the exercise last Monday but we do not have any more space.