Typhoon Haiyan survivors at the resettlement sites: Covid-19 pandemic realities and challenges.

More than 15 thousand households have been relocated in Tacloban North, Philippines, after typhoon Haiyan devastated the city in November 2013. While still recovering from the longer-term impacts of the typhoon, these households are currently enduring the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper reports the contemporary realities and challenges Haiyan survivors face at the resettlement sites of Tacloban city, Philippines based on the inputs of 19 key informants we interviewed from September to November 2020. Our data reveal that Covid-19 exacerbated survivors' access to essential social services such as water, education/learning, and health care. The inadequate shelter space forces survivors to apply non-engineered house repairs or stay out of the house despite quarantine, lockdown, and physical distancing protocols. The pandemic has significantly increased survivors' livelihood insecurity resulting in a surging incidence of hunger, petty crimes, and neighborhood conflicts. This paper brings to the fore typhoon survivors' contemporary, precarious, and challenging conditions in resettlement sites. Almost ten years since Haiyan, this paper explores the extended pathways of Haiyan survivors' strained and uneven recovery hampered by the contemporary public health crisis that is the Covid-19 pandemic.

SDG Final Decade of Action: Resilient Pathways to Build Back Better from High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) Events

The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a blueprint for global peace and prosperity, while conserving natural ecosystems and resources for the planet. However, factors such as climate-induced weather extremes and other High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) events on their own can devastate lives and livelihoods. When a pandemic affects us, as COVID-19 has, any concurrent hazards interacting with it highlight additional challenges to disaster and emergency management worldwide. Such amplified effects contribute to greater societal and environmental risks, with cross-cutting impacts and exposing inequities. Hence, understanding how a pandemic affects the management of concurrent hazards and HILP is vital in disaster risk reduction practice. This study reviews the contemporary literature and utilizes data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) to unpack how multiple extreme events have interacted with the coronavirus pandemic and affected the progress in achieving the SDGs. This study is especially urgent, given the multidimensional societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic amidst climate change. Results indicate that mainstreaming risk management into development planning can mitigate the adverse effects of disasters. Successes in addressing compound risks have helped us understand the value of new technologies, such as the use of drones and robots to limit human exposure. Enhancing data collection efforts to enable inclusive sentinel systems can improve surveillance and effective response to future risk challenges. Stay-at-home policies put in place during the pandemic for virus containment have highlighted the need to holistically consider the built environment and socio-economic exigencies when addressing the pandemic's physical and mental health impacts, and could also aid in the context of increasing climate-induced extreme events. As we have seen, such policies, services, and technologies, along with good nutrition, can significantly help safeguard health and well-being in pandemic times, especially when simultaneously faced with ubiquitous climate-induced extreme events. In the final decade of SDG actions, these measures may help in efforts to 'Leave No One Behind';, enhance human-environment relations, and propel society to embrace sustainable policies and lifestyles that facilitate building back better in a post-pandemic world. Concerted actions that directly target the compounding effects of different interacting hazards should be a critical priority of the Sendai Framework by 2030.

A topic modeling analysis on the early phase of COVID-19 response in the Philippines.

Like many others across the globe, Filipinos continue to suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic. To shed light on how the Philippines initially managed the disease, our paper analyzed the early phase of the government's pandemic response. Using machine learning, we compiled the official press releases issued by the Department of Health from early January to mid-April 2020 where a total of 283,560 datasets amounting to 2.5 megabytes (Mb) were analyzed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm. Our results revealed five latent themes: the highest effort (40%) centered on "Nationwide Reporting of COVID-19 Status", while "Contact Tracing of Suspected and Infected Individuals" had the least focus at only 11.68%- indicating a lack of priority in this area. Our findings suggest that while the government was ill-prepared in the early phase of the pandemic, it exerted efforts in rearranging its fiscal and operational priorities toward the management of the disease. However, we emphasize that this article should be read and understood with caution. More than a year has already passed since the outbreak in the country and many (in)actions and challenges have adversely impacted its response. These include the Duterte administration's securitization and militarization of pandemic response and its apparent failure to find a balance between the lives and livelihoods of Filipinos, to name a few. We strongly recommend that other scholars study the various aspects of the government's response, i.e., economic, peace and security, agriculture, and business, to assess better how the country responded and continually responds to the pandemic.

Philippine Higher Education Institutions in the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic

The year 2020 is plagued with unprecedented problems that challenged the current global and national socio-political, economic, and educational landscapes. In the time of COVID-19 pandemic, the global education system is in the process of transforming and adapting to new and challenging situations which test the conventional learning process of classroom human interaction and capitalize in virtual and online education. This paper tries to elucidate how the Higher Education system of the Philippines experienced and responded to the challenge of providing alternative education and learning services during the COVID-19 pandemic. This case study is divided into three parts. The first part provides an analysis on the policies and guidelines implemented by the country's Commission on Higher Education. The second part interrogates and reflects on the responses, challenges, and best practices employed by universities in implementing these guidelines. Lastly this paper provides general recommendations and argues that Philippine Higher Education Institutions/HEIs should form an Education Continuity Plan that outlines the procedures and instructions that should be followed in the face of a pandemic.